The first picture that he puts on the screen is of a child awakened from its sleep by an enormous beetle with coloured eyes and a walking-stick. When the commotion and the screaming are over, the smaller children are brought back and sit sobbing on their nurses’ knees, somewhere near the door. The proceedings are a trifle damped, but the babies promise, with a catch in their voices, to be very good as they know it is funny. The next picture shows a happy family party at breakfast. There enters a policeman, who by carrying papa away to prison leaves the family in tears, and the breakfast spilled on the cloth. The arrest is found to be a humorous mistake, and papa is brought home after a painful scene in the prison, but the story proves beyond a doubt that no one is safe, even in their own nursery with both parents present. Here, however, our argument seems to break down, because it is probable that the man meant well.
But in the upper classes take, for instance, Reginald himself. He is sometimes appallingly dense, and can be very intelligently tiresome. He lived, until quite lately, with three unmarried sisters, and sometimes when he came home it happened that none of them had been out, and all were eagerly sociable.
“Well, dear, what’s the news?” Louisa might ask.
“Oh, nothing,” Reginald would reply.
“I thought that cook said she had seen posters about a railway accident,” said Agnes.
“Possibly,” replied Reginald, “there may have been.”
“Didn’t you see anything about it?” asked Theresa wistfully.
“It was all in the paper I got coming home——[Chorus: “Where, oh, where is it?”] Sorry, I left it in the train,” said Reginald, and then he would go off to dress. Or the same thing might happen the other way round. Louisa had been out to tea on Saturday afternoon, and seen the paper at a friend’s house. Reginald had been playing golf and was lying half asleep in his chair.
“Such an awful thing has happened,” announced Louisa, very properly, the moment she came in.
“Oh,” said Reginald.