Priscilla regretted that champagne should have to be pleaded in excuse of impertinences to her sex.

They were both combative, nibbed for epigram, edged to inflict wounds; and they were set to shudder openly at one another's practises; they might have exposed to Colney which of the two maniacal sections of his English had the vaster conceit of superiority in purity; they were baring themselves, as it were with a garment flung-off at each retort.
He reproached them for undermineing their countrymen; whose Falstaff panics demanded blood of animals to restore them; and their periods of bragging, that they should brandify their wits to imagine themselves Vikings.
Nataly interposed.

She was vexed with him.

He let his eyelids drop: but the occasion for showing the prickliness of the bristly social English, could not be resisted.

Dr.Peter Yatt was tricked to confess, that small annoyances were, in his experience, powerful on the human frame; and Dr.
John Cormyn was very neatly brought round to assure him he was mistaken if he supposed the homoeopathic doctor who smoked was exercising a destructive influence on the efficacy of the infinitesimal doses he prescribed; Dr.Yatt chuckled a laugh at globules; Dr.Cormyn at patients treated as horses; while Mr.Catkin was brought to praise the smoke of tobacco as our sanctuary from the sex; and Mr.Peridon quietly denied, that the taking of it into his nostrils from the puffs of his friend caused him sad silences: Nesta flew to protect the admirer of her beloved Louise.