Ranny was young, and so they all treated him as if he were neither good nor wise.
And Ranny, desperately tilted backward, looked at them all with a smile that almost confirmed his father's view of his philosophy. He was working up for his great outbreak. He could feel the laughter struggling in his throat.
"I don't say," said Mr. Ransome, ignoring his son's folly, "that I'm complaining of this Boer War in especial. If anything"—he weighed it, determined, in his rectitude, to be just even to the war—"if anything we sold more of some things."
"Now what," said Mrs. Randall, "do you sell most of in time of war?"
"Sleepin' draughts, heart mixture, nerve tonic, stomach mixture, and so forth."
"And he can tell you," said Mr. Randall, "to a month's bookin' what meddycine he'll sell."
"What's more," said the chemist, with a sinister intonation, "I can tell who'll want 'em."
"Can you reelly now?" said Mrs. Randall. "Why, Fulleymore, you should have been a doctor. Shouldn't he, Emmy?"
Mrs. Ransome laughed softly in her pride. "He couldn't be much more than He is. Why, He doctors half the poor people in Wandsworth. They all come to Him, whether it's toothache or bronchitis or the influenza, or a housemaid with a whitlow on her finger, and He prescribes for all. If all the doctors in Wandsworth died to-morrow some of us would be no worse off."
"Many's the doctor's bill he's saved me," said Mr. Randall.