"I should have seen it, though, whether you let me or not. I always see these things."
"But I think, you know, that I wouldn't have been sorry."
"You would! You would! You couldn't have stood me."
"I think I could."
"What, a person with a villainous cockney accent? Who was capable of murdering the Queen's English any day in your drawing-room?"
"Oh, no; whatever you do you'll never do that."
"Well, I don't know. I'm not really to be trusted unless I've got a pen in my hand. I'm better than I used to be. I've struggled against it. Still, a man who has once murdered the Queen's English always feels, you know, as if he'd got the body under the sofa. It's like homicidal mania; the poor wretch may be cured, but he lives in terror of an attack returning. He knows it doesn't matter what he is or what he does; he may live like a saint or write like an archangel; but one aitch omitted from his conversation will wreck him at the last."
"You needn't be afraid; you never omit them."
"You mean I never omit them now. But I did five years ago. I couldn't help it. Everybody about me did it. The only difference between them and me was that I knew it, and they didn't."
"You were conscious of it, then?"