“My dear sir, pray don’t call it so,” said Oldroyd. “I only want to give you good advice. I want you to give me better vegetables than these—from your own garden,” he added, merrily, as he turned to Lucy, who was eagerly watching her brother’s face.
“Thank you, doctor,” replied Alleyne shaking his head; “but I have no time.”
Oldroyd hesitated for a moment or two, as he went on with his repast of very badly cooked, exceedingly tough mutton; but a glance at his hostess and Lucy showed him that his words found favour with them, and he persevered in a pleasant, half-bantering strain that had, however, a solid basis of sound shrewd sense beneath its playful tone.
“Hark at him!” he said. “Has not time! Now, look here, my dear Mr Alleyne—pray excuse my familiarity, for though we have been neighbours these past five years, we have not been intimate—I say, look here, my dear sir—potatoes! Thank you, Miss Alleyne. That one will do. I like them waxey. Now look here, my dear sir, you are an astronomer.”
“Only a very humble student of a great science, Mr Oldroyd,” said the other, meekly.
“Ah, well, we will not discuss that. At all events you are a mathematician, and deal in algebraic quantities, and differential calculus, and logarithms, and all that sort of thing.”
“Yes—yes,” said Alleyne, going on eating in his mechanical way as if he diligently took to heart the epigrammatic teaching of the old philosopher—“Live not to eat, but eat to live.”
“Well then, my dear sir, I’ll give you a calculation to make.”
“Not now, doctor, pray,” said Mrs Alleyne, quickly. “My son’s digestion is very weak.”
“This won’t hurt his digestion, madam,” said Oldroyd; “a child could do it without a slate.”