His face was inscrutable.
"Do you think," she said, "you could find me a nice clean one somewhere? I've got two in soak."
He smiled in spite of himself at the gravity, the importance of her air.
He went off to look all over the house for the nice clean one that Winny was certain must be somewhere. In a basin by the open window of the bedroom he found the two horrors that she had put there to soak.
"What's wrong with these?" said he.
For one moment it was as if Winny were indignant.
"You put your nose to them and you'll soon see what's wrong."
He did and saw. It was not for nothing that he had been born over a chemist's shop in Wandsworth High Street. He had heard his father and his mother (and Mercier even) comment on the sluts whose sluttishness sent up the death rate of the infant population.
He kept his back to Winny as he stood there by the window.
"The bi—!" A bad word, a word that he would not for worlds have uttered in a woman's presence, half formed itself on Ranny's lips. He turned. "Well," he said, aloud, "I am—Let's throw the filthy things away. They're poisonous."