“Father, I thought I’d drive the Napier over to meet Lady Austell and Dora,” he said, “if you don’t mind.”
“Why, there’s the two landaus going, and the brougham, and the bus for the servants,” said Mrs. Osborne. “What for do you want the car?”
Claude flushed a little.
“Oh, I only thought I should like to drive it,” he said. “It’s a smart turnout, too, and Dora likes motors.”
Mr. Osborne’s watch chain again responded to ventral agitations.
“Blest if he doesn’t want to give his girl a drive in his dad’s best car, to show off the car and his driving,” he said with some jocosity, which drew on him brother Alfred’s malignancy again.
“It’s a good thing you haven’t got to do the driving, Edward,” he observed. “Why shouldn’t the boy have the car out? I’ll pay for the petrol.”
The suggestion conveyed here was not quite a random libel. Alfred, with his inconvenient habit of observation, had seen that the cost of petrol was a thing that worried his brother and promised to be a pet economy, like the habit of untying parcels to save string, or lighting as many cigarettes as possible at the same match, or the tendency shown by Lady Austell to traverse miles of dusty streets in order to leave a note instead of posting it. And Mr. Osborne got up a little more hastily than he would otherwise have done if this remark had not been made.
“Oh, take the car, take the car, Claude,” he said. “Very glad you should, my boy. Now, Mrs. O., you and I will go in and see where we’ll hang our likenesses.”
Mr. Alfred waited till they had gone, and then drew his plaid a little closer round his shoulders with another squeak of laughter.