[Illustration: Illustration for "Wives and Daughters"

_The Cornhill_, 1865.]

Sometimes du Maurier even depicted delightful children as the victims of
the fashionable crazes that he loved to attack, and thus we are brought
to another series of dialogues--as a rule though only involving the
"grown-ups"--in which the legend and the type of person depicted,
together, form a most valuable document of the times. There is for
instance the China mania--in the following in the incipient stage:--

"O Mamma! O! O! N--N--Nurse has given me my C--C--Cod-liver Oil out
of a p--p--plain white mug" (_December_ 26, 1874).

Then the inimitable colloquies of the æsthetes--and especially the now
famous one about the six-mark tea-pot.

_Aesthetic Bridegroom_. "It is quite consummate, is it not?"

_Intense Bride_. "It is, indeed! Oh, Algernon, let us live up to
it!"

Also the direction, to the architect about the country house:

_Fair Client_. "I want it to be nice and baronial, Queen Anne and
Elizabethan, and all that; kind of quaint and Nuremburgy you
know--regular Old English, with French windows opening to the lawn,
and Venetian blinds, and sort of Swiss balconies, and a loggia. But
I'm sure _you_ know what I mean!" (_November_ 29, 1890).