"Did he give you anythink?" he asked.
"I didn't ask him for nohun," Ern answered, aggrieved.
Alf sneered.
"Fat 'ead!" he cried. "Aynt arf soft, Ern aynt!"
Their father, dressing at the upper window, heard the conversation and agonized. Tolerant as was Edward Caspar of grammatical solecisms, his ear, sensitive as Lady Blanche's, writhed at the mangling of vowels by his second son. His wife, who came from the Bucks border of the great city on the Thames, had indeed the Cockney phrase but not the offending accent.
When he came downstairs, in a moment of despair, he poured his troubles into Anne's unsympathetic ear.
"What a way to talk!" he groaned.
"I don't see it matters," his wife answered grimly. "They aren't going to Harrow and Trinity."
The big man winced. It was a real grief to him that his sons were not to have in life the advantages that he believed himself to have been given.
"You needn't throw that up at me," he grumbled into his brown beard.