“Oh, Hube!” snapped Edith. “He’s well underneath the bedclothes. Trust Hube for that. Nothing’d get him out of bed except an earthquake.”
“Wouldn’t it, then?” said a sleek voice, and Hube himself, an extremely fat young man in a trailing nightgown, appeared in the doorway.
“You wouldn’t think he was only nineteen, would you?” said Fred, proudly.
“Nice noise to kick up in the middle of the night,” Hubert grumbled. “I dreamt the house was falling down on top of me.”
“And it will, too,” Fred prophesied, “if I can’t soon scrape together some money for repairs. There’s a crack as wide as the strand down the back.”
Sylvia wondered how so rickety a house was able to withstand the wear and tear of such a fat family when they all, with the exception of Arthur, who lay down on the kitchen table, went creaking up-stairs to bed.
The examination of Monkley’s cash-box produced £35; Sylvia felt ineffably rich, so rich that she offered to lend Fred Organ the money he wanted to repair his property. He accepted the offer in the spirit in which it was made, as he said, and Sylvia, whom contact with Monkley had left curiously uncynical, felt that she had endeared herself to Fred Organ for a long time to come. She was given a room of her own at No. 53, for which she was glad, because sleeping with Edith had been rather like eating scented cornflour pudding, a combination of the flabby with the stuffy that had never appeared to her taste. Arthur was given the choice of sleeping with Hubert or in the bath, and he chose the latter without a moment’s hesitation.
Relations between Arthur and Hubert had been strained ever since. Hubert offered Arthur a bite from an apple he was munching, which was refused with a too obvious disgust.
“Go on, what do you take me for? Eve?” asked Hubert, indignantly. “It won’t poison you.”