They don't drink two glasses of wine after dinner, and every other man
at table is a country curate, with a white neckcloth, whose talk is
about Polly Higson's progress at school, or widow Watkins's lumbago.
"And the other young men, those lounging guardsmen and great lazy
dandies--sprawling over sofas and billiard-tables, and stealing off
to smoke pipes in each other's bedrooms, caring for nothing,
reverencing nothing, not even an old gentleman who has known their
fathers and their betters, not even a pretty woman--what a difference
there is between these men who poison the very turnips and
stubble-fields with their tobacco, and the gentlemen of our time!"
thinks the major; "the breed is gone--there's no use for 'em; they're
replaced by a parcel of damned cotton-spinners and utilitarians, and
young sprigs of parsons with their hair combed down their backs. I'm
getting old: they're getting past me: they laugh at us old boys,"
thought old Pendennis. And he was not far wrong; the times and manners
which he admired were pretty nearly gone--the gay young men 'larked'
him irreverently, while the serious youth had a grave pity and wonder
at him, which would have been even more painful to bear, had the old
gentleman been aware of its extent.
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