Cummings: Baths? You may well say that, Mr. Bunter. Baths? Me and my wife sleep next to the cistern-room. Noise fit to wake the dead. All hours. When d’you think he chose to have a bath, no later than last Monday night, Mr. Bunter?
Bunter: I’ve known them to do it at two in the morning, Mr. Cummings.
Cummings: Have you, now? Well, this was at three. Three o’clock in the morning we was waked up. I give you my word.
Bunter: You don’t say so, Mr. Cummings.
Cummings: He cuts up diseases, you see, Mr. Bunter, and then he don’t like to go to bed till he’s washed the bacilluses off, if you understand me. Very natural, too, I daresay. But what I say is, the middle of the night’s no time for a gentleman to be occupying his mind with diseases.
Bunter: These great men have their own way of doing things.
Cummings: Well, all I can say is, it isn’t my way.
(I could believe that, your lordship. Cummings has no signs of greatness about him, and his trousers are not what I would wish to see in a man of his profession.)
Bunter: Is he habitually as late as that, Mr. Cummings?
Cummings: Well, no, Mr. Bunter, I will say, not as a general rule. He apologized, too, in the morning, and said he would have the cistern seen to—and very necessary, in my opinion, for the air gets into the pipes, and the groaning and screeching as goes on is something awful. Just like Niagara, if you follow me, Mr. Bunter, I give you my word.