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Shadows and sunbeams: Being a second series of Fern leaves from Fanny's portfolio cover

Shadows and sunbeams: Being a second series of Fern leaves from Fanny's portfolio

Chapter 53: A PUNCH AT “PUNCH.”
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About This Book

A varied collection of short essays, sketches, and soliloquies mixes humor and sentiment to portray domestic and civic life. Vignettes range from rural scenes and bereavement to city routines and boarding-house experience, emphasizing financial dependence, household labor, and the social pressures on women. The pieces alternate pointed satire of fashion, clergy, and public manners with practical reflections on housekeeping, parenting, and charity, using anecdote and direct address to balance wit, moral observation, and sympathetic portraiture.

A PUNCH AT “PUNCH.”

“What is the height of a woman’s ambition? Diamonds.”—Punch.

Sagacious Punch! Do you know the reason? It is because the more “diamonds” a woman owns, the more precious she becomes in the eyes of your discriminating sex. What pair of male eyes ever saw a “crow’s foot,” gray hair, or wrinkle, in company with a genuine diamond? Don’t you go down on your marrow bones, and vow that the owner is a Venus, a Hebe, a Juno, a sylph, a fairy, an angel? Would you stop to look (connubially) at the most bewitching woman on earth, whose only diamonds were “in her eye?” Well, it is no great marvel, Mr. Punch. The race of men is about extinct. Now and then you will meet with a specimen; but I’m sorry to inform you that the most of them are nothing but coat tails, walking behind a moustache, destitute of sufficient energy to earn their own cigars and “Macassar,” preferring to dangle at the heels of a diamond wife, and meekly receive their allowance, as her mamma’s prudence and her own inclinations may suggest.