And soon there came in the general talk and business one of those sudden
lulls which catch speakers unawares, and Mr. Beauchamp was found
saying--
'I saw her play on Thursday, and, upon my honour, the Bellamy is a
mockery, a skeleton and a spectacle.'
'That's no reason,' said Aunt Becky, who, as usual, had got up a
skirmish, and was firing away in the cause of Mossop and Smock-alley
play-house; 'why, she would be fraudulently arrested in her own chair,
on her way to the play-house, by the contrivance of the rogue Barry, and
that wicked mountebank, Woodward.'
'You're rather hard upon them, Madam,' said Mrs. Colonel Stafford, who
stood up for Crow-street, with a slight elevation of her chin.
'Very true, indeed, Mistress Chattesworth,' cried the dowager,
overlooking Madam Stafford's parenthesis, and tapping an applause with
her fan, and, at the same time, rewarding the champion of Smock-alley,
for she was one of the faction, with one of her large, painted smiles,
followed by a grave and somewhat supercilious glance at the gentleman of
the household; 'and I don't believe _they_, at least, can think her a
spectacle, and--a--the like, or they'd hardly have conspired to lock her
in a sponging-house, while she should have been in the play-house.
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