The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 336: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

MADAME ANGELIQUE’S THREE BILLETS 305 we ourselves say nothing, for Mr. White Choker was a saint. Yes, great indeed was he at Exeter Hall at the period of the May meetings. Who could so well declaim against the ignorance and demoralization of the lower classes? Who could whine and moan and weep in such desperate anguish at the benighted condition of the heathen, thousands and thousands of miles off in the islands of the South Pacific? Who could so pathetically enforce the necessity of sending missionaries, and flannel jackets, and hymn-books, and tracts, and all kinds of godly publications, to the poor naked cannibals of those same islands? Who was more ready in putting down his money for the Foreign Bible Society, or in taking up the starving beggar who implored alms of him in a street of the British metropolis? In a word, Mr. White Choker was a veritable saint; his name was considered syn- onymous with piety and philanthropy themselves, and if it were the fashion in this Protestant country for persons to be canonized, — and before they were dead, too, — Mr. White Choker was the very man whom all the Exeter Hallites would have selected for the honour, and whom the whole bench of bishops would have pronounced worthy thereof. Of course the reader is fully prepared to hear that so good a man could only have come to Madame Angelique’s estab- lishment with one object, namely, to read its proprietress a very long and serious lecture on the wickedness of the life she was leading. And yet somehow or another this was not the worthy gentleman’s aim, for, as we have seen, it was in answer to one of the milliner’s billets that he now showed himself in her presence. ‘“My dear Mr. Choker,’ she began, with one of her most amiable smiles, “‘ I am sure you will be delighted to learn that I have resolved upon retiring from business and living henceforth respectably upon my means.”’ ‘‘ Come now, mother,” said the white-cravatted gentleman, with a more successful attempt at a laugh than he had pre- viously made, “ this is not Exeter Hall, neither is it a com- mittee of the Foreign Cannibal-reclaiming, Negro-Christian- izing and Naked-savage-clothing Society. Everything is good in its place and way — ”’ | ‘““ And you have come, my dear Mr. Choker,’ interrupted Madame Angelique, blandly, ‘‘ for whatsoever I may have CORNICLOO© cS (CO)