“Why, if he’s not trying to buy them cheap off us,” she said, “and sell them expensive. Twenty-five pounds apiece! as if you didn’t know that the frames came to more. You and your joking, Alfred! Take a cucumber sandwich, which I know you like, though how you digest such cold vegetables at tea passes me. Why, I am reminded of a cucumber sandwich for hours after.”
“Where are you going to hang them?” asked brother Alfred.
“And if we weren’t just going indoors when we’ve finished our tea to look!” said Mrs. Osborne cordially. “Do come with us, Alfred, and give your advice.”
“I should recommend the coal cellar,” said Alfred. “They want toning.”
“Why, and he’s at his joke again!” said Mrs. Osborne, with placid admiration.
There is probably nothing more aggravating to a man in a thoroughly bad temper than to fail in communicating one single atom of it to others, but to have your most galling attacks received with perfect good humour. Such was the case with poor Alfred now; he could no more expunge the satisfaction from Eddie’s streaming countenance, or strike the smile from his sister-in-law’s powdered face, than he could make a wax doll cease smiling, except by smashing its features altogether. He tried a few further shafts slightly more poisoned.
“It’s odd to me, Maria,” he said, “that you don’t see how Sabincourt, or whatever the dauber’s name is——”
“Yes, Mr. Sabincourt, quite correct,” said Mrs. Osborne.
“How he has simply been making caricatures of you and my poor brother, making you sit with your rings and bracelets and necklaces and tiaras, just to show them off. And you, too, Edward, there you sit at your table with a ledger and a cash box and a telephone, just for all the world as if you were saying, ‘This is what honest hardware has done for me!’”
Mrs. Osborne was slightly nettled by this attack on her husband, but still she did not show it.