“It’s as my mother taught me.”
“I don’t care.”
“I’ll not alter from mother’s way.”
Stephen was baffled. Then he said, “How does your mother make it rhyme?”
“Wot?”
“Squat. You’re an ass, and I’m not. Poems want rhymes. ‘Alley’ comes next line.”
He said “alley” was—welcome to come if it liked.
“It can’t. You want Sally. Sally—alley. Em’ly-alley doesn’t do.”
“Emily-femily!” cried the soldier, with an inspiration that was not his when sober. “My mother taught me femily.
“‘For she’s the darling of merart, And she lives in my femily.’”