'A little dab out, as Sibby calls it,' said Lance. 'It's my puggery. Ever since it fell overboard it has been a disgrace to human nature, so I have been washing it, and now I've got an iron heating.'
'What a mess you will make of it!' observed Felix, with a grimace of disgust, as Lance returned again from the kitchen, holding the iron scientifically near his cheek.
'That's all you know about it! Why, I've ironed dozens of pocket-handkerchiefs—at least, not dozens, but my own, dozens of times—in the Harewood tubs.'
'I thought the Chapter washed you?'
'So it does, in reason; but last spring there was a doom on my pocket-handkerchiefs. The Harewood puppy ate up one; one dropped into the canal; I tied up a fellow that had got a cut with one, and the beggar never returned it; and two or three more went I don't know how. I knew W. W. would be in a dreadful state if I asked for a fresh lot, so I used to wash out the last two by turns, till I got some tip and bought some fresh ones—such jolly ones, all over acrobats and British flags; and after all, didn't I catch it? Wilmet was no end of disgusted to miss her little stupid speckotty ones, vowed these weren't decent for the Cathedral, and boned them all for Theodore! Now, hush! or I shall come to grief!'
Felix held his pen suspended to watch the dexterity that reduced the crude mass to smooth muslin, which in its expanded state looked as impracticable as before.
'Now, do you mean to get Mrs. Pettigrew to put it on in those elegant festoons?'
'You just mind your leader, Blunderbore! A man who has had women to do for him all his life is a pitiable being!'
And Lance, according to instructions obtained from John Harewood, wreathed his hat triumphantly in the white drapery, and completed Felix's surprise and amusement by producing a needle and thread, and setting to work on various needful repairs of his own buttons and his brother's, over which he shook his head in amusement as he chuckled at the decay which had befallen the garments of so neat a personage as Felix, and which had been very distressing to himself.
'Ah! thank you. I never knew what Robinson Crusoe felt like before!' said Felix, as Lance came on a wrist-band minus button.