Social Warfare and Museum Manners — Evelina, Or, the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World

Madame Duval returns with Monsieur Du Bois, and Captain Mirvan will not let them sit in peace. He asks which she liked better, the warm room at Ranelagh or the cold bath afterwards, and he will not let her soften a story he means to enjoy: a draggle-tailed gentlewoman and a drowned Frenchman. She is sure she heard him snigger while she lay in the mud. Du Bois believes someone jolted him. The Captain laughs hard enough to make Evelina suspect him, then denies the push and refuses the idea that an Englishman should have helped. Sir Clement arrives with the ease of an old acquaintance, which is what recommends him to the Captain. In mock gravity he suggests Du Bois should have asked whether the lady preferred soft or hard ground before he dropped her. Du Bois answers in French that he is not of a nation of brutes, that he suffered in trying to save her, and that a malevolent push caused the fall. Duval would give fifty guineas to know who shoved them.

Mrs. Mirvan ends the dispute by proposing Cox's Museum. Evelina finds the show superb and almost without pleasure. Willoughby seizes her mild admission that she seems to miss something, and calls it taste. The Captain asks the use of the devices. A pineapple opens into singing birds, and Duval is in ecstasies. During the Coronation Anthem he calls for salts and puts them to her nostrils until she screams, then claims he thought she was going into hysterics. Her anger only increases his laughter, and he is loud enough in public that the party is ashamed to belong to him.

She dines again in Queen Ann Street. Places are taken at Drury Lane, and Mrs. Mirvan invites her. A bad cold keeps her at home. Evelina is sorry for the indisposition. She does not know how to be sorry that Madame Duval will miss the play, for she is, as the letter will not quite say, very unlike other people.