“He certainly was condescending,” she grumbled, and went on with some satire: “Did you hear him allude to himself as a ‘Realtor?’ ”
“Well, why shouldn’t he? He is one. That’s his business.”
“My Lord the Realtor!” Mrs. Sperry cried mockingly. “There ought to be an opera written called ‘Il Realtor’ like the one there used to be with the title ‘Il Janitor.’ Those are such romantic words! ‘Toreador,’ ‘Realtor,’ ‘Humidor’——”
“Here, here!” her husband said. “Calm down! You seem to have got yourself worked up into a mighty sarcastic mood for some reason. Those people only want to be nice to us and they’re all right.”
Mrs. Sperry looked at him coldly. “Did you hear Mr. Sullender saying that his company had sold seven ‘homes’ this month?” she inquired.
“Oh, you can’t expect everybody to know all the purist niceties of the English language,” he said. “Sullender’s all right and his wife struck me as one of the nicest, kindest women I ever——”
“Kind!” Mrs. Sperry echoed loudly. “She doesn’t stop at being ‘kind’! She’s so caressingly tender, so angelically loving, that she can’t possibly pronounce a one-syllabled word without making two syllables of it! Did you notice that she said ‘yay-yus’ for ‘yes’, and ‘no-oh’ for ‘no’? I do hate the turtle-dove style of talking, and I never met a worse case of it. Mrs. Sullender’s the sweetest sweet-woman I ever saw in my life and I’m positive she leads her husband a dog’s life!”
“What nonsense!”
“It serves him right for his Realtoring, though,” Mrs. Sperry added thoughtfully. “He ought to have that kind of a wife!”
“But you just said she was the sweetest——”