"Perhaps not, Tina, perhaps not," chuckled the doctor, "but yours is a practical mind, and there's nothing, I've always said, like a practical mind for seeing things crooked. It suits a crooked world, I suppose, and that's why it usually manages to get on so well in it."
"And I'd like to know how you see things, Theophilus," sniffed Mrs. Clay, whose temper was rising.
"I see them as they are, Tina, which isn't in the very least as they appear," rejoined the good man, unruffled.
He bent forward, made a lunge with his trowel at a solitary blade of grass growing in the bed of bleeding hearts, and after uprooting it, returned with a tranquil face to his garden chair.
But Mrs. Clay, having, as he had said, a practical mind, merely sniffed while she wiped off the small green table with a red-bordered napkin and scattered the crumbs of sponge-cake to the greedy slate-coloured pigeons.
"If I judged you by what you appear, Theophilus," she retorted, crushingly, "I should have judged you for a fool on the day you were born."
This sally, which was delivered with spirit, afforded the doctor an evident relish.
"If you knew your Juvenal, my dear," he responded, with perfect good humour, "you would remember: Fronti nulla fides."
Rising from his seat, he stooped fondly over the bed of bleeding hearts, and gathering a few blossoms, presented them to Sally, with a courtly bow.
"A favourite flower of mine. My poor mother was always very partial to it," he remarked.