Some are for the
graceful worldliness of wit, of which they have just share enough to
admire it. Some are captivated by hands that can wield the rod, which in
earlier days they escaped to their cost. In the case of General Ople, it
was partly her whippings of him, partly her penetration; her ability,
that sat so finely on a wealthy woman, her indifference to conventional
manners, that so well beseemed a nobly-born one, and more than all, her
correction of his little weaknesses and incompetencies, in spite of his
dislike of it, won him. He began to feel a sort of nibbling pleasure in
her grotesque sketches of his person; a tendency to recur to the old ones
while dreading the arrival of new. You hear old gentlemen speak fondly of
the swish; and they are not attached to pain, but the instrument revives
their feeling of youth; and General Ople half enjoyed, while shrinking,
Lady Camper's foregone outlines of him. For in the distance, the
whip's-end may look like a clinging caress instead of a stinging flick.
But this craven melting in his heart was rebuked by a very worthy pride,
that flew for support to the injury she had done to his devotions, and
the offence to the sacred edifice.
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