Miss Marjoribanks by Margaret Oliphant

This was how the crisis came to an end, which had been of so much interest to the parties immediately affected. Mrs. Woodburn had one of her nervous attacks next morning, and was very ill, and alarmed Dr. Marjoribanks; but at her very worst moment the incorrigible mimic convulsed her anxious medical adviser and all her attendants by a sudden adoption of the character of Mrs. Mortimer, whom she must have made a careful study of the previous night. "Tell him to tell him to go downstairs," cried the half-dead patient; "I want to speak to him, and he is not to hear; -- if he were not so thoughtless, he would offer him some lunch at least," Mrs. Woodburn said pathetically, with closed eyes and a face as pale as death. "She never did anything better in her life," Dr. Marjoribanks said afterwards; and Mr. Woodburn, who was fond of his wife in his way, and had been crying over her, burst into such an explosion of laughter that all the servants were scandalised.

And the patient improved from that moment. She was perfectly well and in the fullest force a week afterwards, when she came to see Lucilla, who had also been slightly indisposed for a day or two. When Thomas had shut the door, and the two were quite alone, Mrs. Woodburn hugged Miss Marjoribanks with a fervour which up to that moment she had never exhibited. "It was only necessary that we should get into full sympathy with each other as human creatures," she said, lifting her finger like the Archdeacon; and for all the rest of that autumn and winter Mrs. Woodburn kept society in Carlingford in a state of inextinguishable laughter. The odd thing was that Miss Marjoribanks, who had been one of her favourite characters, disappeared almost entirely from her repertory. Not quite altogether, because there were moments of supreme temptation which the mimic could not resist; but as a general rule Lucilla was the only woman in Carlingford who escaped the universal critic.