_you_ should say 'P's and Q's,' darling."

That day her hospitable board was spread over a trap. Blessed with an
oracle irrelevantly fluent, and dumb to the point, she had asked him to
dinner with maternal address. He could not be on his guard eternally;
sooner or later, through inadvertence, or in a moment of convivial
recklessness, or in a parenthesis of some grand Generality, he would cure
her child: or, perhaps, at his rate of talking, would wear out all his
idle themes, down to the very "well-being of mankind;" and them Julia's
mysterious indisposition would come on the blank tapis. With these secret
hopes she presided at the feast, all grace and gentle amity. Julia, too,
sat down with a little design, but a very different one, viz., of being
chilly company; for she disliked this new acquaintance, and hated the
science of medicine.

The unconscious Object chatted away with both, and cut their replies very
short, and did strange things: sent away Julia's chicken, regardless of
her scorn, and prescribed mutton; called for champagne and made her drink
it and pout; and thus excited Mrs. Dodd's hopes that he was attending to
the case by degrees.

But after dinner, Julia, to escape medicine universal and particular,
turned to her mother, and dilated on treachery of her literary guide, the
_Criticaster._ "It said 'Odds and Ends' was a good novel to read by the
seaside. So I thought then oh! how different it must be from most books,
if you can sit by the glorious sea and even look at it. So I sent for it
directly, and, would you believe, it was an ignoble thing; all
flirtations and curates. The sea indeed! A pond would be fitter to read
it by; and one with a good many geese on."