"Then may I consider," I said, "that your objections are removed? We have your consent?"
He stamped angrily, and his bare foot came down on a small but singularly sharp pebble. With a brief exclamation he seized the foot with one hand and hopped. While hopping, he delivered his ultimatum. Probably this is the only instance on record of a father adopting this attitude in dismissing a suitor.
"You may not," he said. "You may not consider any such thing. My objections were never more—absolute. You detain me in the water till I am blue, sir, blue with cold, in order to listen to the most preposterous and impudent nonsense I ever heard."
This was unjust. If he had heard me attentively from the first and avoided interruptions and not behaved like a submarine, we should have got through our little business in half the time. We might both have been dry and clothed by now.
I endeavored to point this out to him.
"Don't talk to me, sir," he roared, hobbling off across the beach to his dressing tent. "I will not listen to you. I will have nothing to do with you. I consider you impudent, sir."
"I am sure it was unintentional, Mr. Derrick."
"Isch!" he said—being the first occasion and the last on which I ever heard that remarkable word proceed from the mouth of man.
And he vanished into his tent, while I, wading in once more, swam back to the Cob and put on my clothes.
And so home, as Pepys would have said, to breakfast, feeling depressed.