“Dimmy, you’re a brute! a beast! that’s what you are!” she cried. “Do you see what you’ve done? Oh, father will be angry! Oh, he will talk! He will be eloquent! He’ll be ever such a lot worse than he is on Sundays.”
His daughter, still on her knees, looked the picture of despair.
“Will he be cursive?” I amiably inquired.
“No,” said the miserable Grace, vainly trying to readjust the fragments. “He don’t take on like that. Wish he did; then it wouldn’t be so rough. When he has you on the carpet, he chucks a lot of high dictionary language at you, like he does in his sermons—awful big words, you know; what you can’t understand, you know. And they must mean a dreadful lot more than those you can, mustn’t they? Oh, he’s just horribly, awfully polite. Last time he told me ‘to restrain my primeval instincts.’ That’s a nice thing to say, isn’t it? Does he mean don’t play the goat, or what? Shouldn’t mind if I only knew what he meant.”
“He means don’t play the Angora,” said the luminous I, with an air of knowledge.
“Oh, that’s it, is it,” said Grace; “then why don’t he jolly well say so, then, instead of rolling up ‘primeval instincts’ to you and that kind o’ lingo?”
Grace having by this tenderly gathered Pearson on the Creed, and having cunningly contrived to restore him to some semblance of his former unimpeachable respectability, rose from her knees, and returned to the attack.
“Dimmy, do come from that door, there’s a nice old chap,” she said. “I’ll be so good. I’m sure I’ll listen to you when I’ve told the boys. I’m simply dying to tell ’em. Dimmy, you brute! come from that door at once!”
“Sit down,” said I, stretching my finger out in my laconic sternness.
“If you don’t,” said she, “I’ll get Hengstenberg’s Dissertations on the Genuineness and Authenticity of the Pentateuch to you. That’ll make you howl if it hits you, I’ll give you my word. And it don’t matter if we do knock the stuffing out o’ that, ’cause it isn’t orthodox, you know.”