“Oh yes. Very changeable weather indeed. It looked quite promising yesterday morning in the town, but it began to rain at noon.”
“A quarter past eleven, my dear,” Mr Skratdj’s voice would be heard to say from several chairs down, in the corrective tones of a husband and a father; “and really, my dear, so far from being a promising morning, I must say it looked about as threatening as it well could. Your memory is not always accurate in small matters, my love.” But Mrs Skratdj had not been a wife and a mother for fifteen years, to be snuffed out at one snap of the marital snuffers. As Mr Skratdj leaned forward in his chair, she leaned forward in hers, and defended herself across the intervening couples.
“Why, my dear Mr Skratdj, you said yourself the weather had not been so promising for a week.”
“What I said, my dear, pardon me, was that the barometer was higher than it had been for a week. But, as you might have observed if these details were in your line, my love, which they are not, the rise was extraordinarily rapid, and there is no surer sign of unsettled weather.—But Mrs Skratdj is apt to forget these unimportant trifles,” he added, with a comprehensive smile round the dinner-table; “her thoughts are very properly absorbed by the more important domestic questions of the nursery.”
“Now I think that’s rather unfair on Mr Skratdj’s part,” Mrs Skratdj would chirp, with a smile quite as affable and as general as her husband’s. “I’m sure he’s quite as forgetful and inaccurate as I am. And I don’t think my memory is at all a bad one.”
“You forgot the dinner hour when we were going out to dine last week, nevertheless,” said Mr Skratdj.
“And you couldn’t help me when I asked you,” was the sprightly retort. “And I’m sure it’s not like you to forget anything about dinner, my dear.”
“The letter was addressed to you,” said Mr Skratdj.
“I sent it to you by Jemima,” said Mrs Skratdj.
“I didn’t read it,” said Mr Skratdj.