“Pardon me. It takes one person to start a subject, but two to drop it. Will you permit me to express myself plainly?”
“Oh, certainly. Dear me, Mynheer van Helmont, I had understood you to say you were shy?”
“Again I beg your pardon. I can understand fun, and I can understand earnest; but which is it to be?”
“I apprehend you. You do not recognize humor outside the comic papers. You are like my father. I laugh most at the dentist’s. It is to be earnest, please.”
“The house is crowded with treasures. Sell one or two.”
“I cannot; they belong to my mother-in-law.”
“Do away with a carriage you can’t pay for, and go on foot.”
“I cannot. I keep a sort of boarding-house, and my two boarders pay for the carriage, not I.”
“Eat dry bread instead of hot lunch.”