“Sit down, Teddy,” Charlie enjoined.
“Oh! I’m all right, thanks,” said Edwin.
“Sit down!” Charlie insisted, using force.
“Do you talk to your poor patients in that tone?” Alicia inquired, from the shelter of her father.
“Here I come down specially to see them,” Charlie mused aloud, as he twisted the corkscrew into the cork of the bottle, unceremoniously handed to him by Martha, “and not only they don’t offer to pay my fares, but they grudge me a drop of claret! Plupp!” He grimaced as the cork came out. “And my last night, too! Hilda, this is better than coffee, as Saint Paul remarked on a famous occasion. Pass your glass.”
“Charlie!” his mother protested. “I’ll thank you to leave Saint Paul out.”
“Charlie! Your mother will be boxing your ears if you don’t mind,” his father warned him.
“I’ll not have it!” said his mother, shaking her head in a fashion that she imagined to be harsh and forbidding.