"I'm glad you did."
"So am I."
"Glad?"
"Glad."
"HAH!" said Rampole, exhaling the air in triumph.
From ahead of them rose Mrs. Fell's thin voice. "Azaleas, petunias, geraniums, hollyhocks, honeysuckle, and eglantine!" she shrilled, as though she ' were calling trains. "I can't see 'em, on account of being so nearsighted, but I know they're there." With a beaming if somewhat vague smile she grasped the newcomers and urged them into chairs. "Oh, Gideon, my love, you're not going after that horrible beer, are you?"
Dr. Fell was already bending over the stream. Puffing laboriously, he extracted several beaded bottles and hauled himself up on one cane.
"Notice, Mr. Rampole," said the rector, with an air of comfortable tolerance. "I often think," he continued, as though he were launching a terrible accusation but slyly smiling to mitigate it―"I often think that the good doctor can't be English at all. This barbarous habit of drinking beer at tea-time my dear sir! It isn't-well, it isn't English, you know!"
Dr. Fell raised a fiery face.
"Sir," he said, "it's tea that isn't English, let me inform you. I want you to look at the appendix of my book, Note 86, Chapter 9, devoted to such things as tea, cocoa, and that unmentionably awful beverage known as the ice-cream soda. Tea, you will find, came into England from Holland in 1666. From Holland, her bitter enemy; and in Holland they contemptuously called it hay-water. Even the French couldn't stand it. Patin calls tea l’impertinente nouveaute du siecle,' and Dr. Duncan, in his Treatise on Hot Liquors―"