To Mrs. Caffyn the drawing-room seemed the only fit environment for an appalling problem the day had brought her, the only atmosphere that could brace her to confront its solution, but Dorothy, who was cold after her nerves by drinking the fresh tea brought in for a late arrival. Dorothy came down-stairs, rather cross at having been disturbed from her afternoon nap, and Mr. Caffyn, a Cenci of suburban prose, confronted his wife and daughter.
"I have seldom felt such a fool," he began upon a note of pompous reminiscence that whistled in his mustache like a wind through withered sedge on the margin of a December stream. "I have never felt such a fool," he corrected himself, "as I was made to feel this afternoon by my own wife and my own daughter. I go to your bank," he proclaimed, fixing his wife's wavering eye—"I go to your bank, and there, in the presence of my eldest son, I ask to see Mr. Jones, the manager, with a view to improving your financial position."
"How kind of you, dear," she murmured, in an attempt to propitiate him before it was too late.
"Yes," Mr. Caffyn went on, apparently not in the least softened by the compliment. "In your interest I abandon for a whole hour my own work—the work of the society I represent, although, mark you, I knew full well that by so doing I should be kept in the office another whole hour after my usual time."
Dorothy looked sarcastically at her wrist-watch, and her father bellowed like a bull on the banks of that stream in midsummer.
"Silence, Norah!"
"Are you speaking to me?" she inquired. "Because if you are, I'd rather, firstly, that you spoke to me without shouting; secondly, that you didn't call me Norah; and thirdly, that you didn't say I was talking when I was only looking at my watch."
Mr. Caffyn, throwing up his head in a mute appeal for Heaven to note his daughter's unnatural behavior, swallowed a crumb the wrong way, the noisy attempts to rescue which allowed his wife a moment's grace to dab her forehead with a handkerchief; her tears, like the crumb, had chosen another route, and the fresh tea was excessively hot.
"Where was I?" Mr. Caffyn demanded, indignantly, when he had disposed of the crumb.
"I think you'd just got to my bank, dear," his wife suggested, timidly.