Twitters. No, the honest love of a father is lasting—come to breakfast.
Clara (going to table sobbing). T-two lumps in your coffee, papa?
Twitters (with emphasis). Great Heavens! No! (Recovering himself.) That has been my usual dose.
Clara. Dose! (Sobbing again.) O dear! Poor Charles!
Twitters (aside). A deadly dose for an adult is five grains—twelve times eleven hundred and fifty-two—enough to kill twenty-five thousand women and children. The board of water commissioners are a choir of white-robed angels beside my partner if this is true. Why will you put so much sugar in your coffee, dear? You make it a perfect liqueur!
Clara. I always had a sweet tooth.
Twitters. A sweet tooth leads through a heap of dentist’s bills to a set of false ones. I can’t have you eating these horrid sweet things, candies, sweet-meats, ices, and jams. Your dentist’s bills ruin—(he has pulled her coffee cup towards him, and put salt into it).
Clara. What are you doing with my coffee, papa?
Twitters. Putting salt in it; it’s not coffee that hurts you, it’s the mixture of coffee and sugar. I read somewhere that coffee and sugar together make leather.
Clara. No, papa; tea and milk.