“What a thing it is,” she muttered to herself on her way home, “to put things into the hands of a man—one you can feel sure will do everything sensibly and well, and without fuss.” The good lady meant no disparagement to her sex by this—far from it; she referred to a manly man as compared with an unmanly one, and she thought, for one moment, rather disparagingly about the salute which her Samuel’s bald pate had given to the door that morning. Probably she failed to think of the fussy manner in which she herself had assaulted the superintendent of police, for it is said that people seldom see themselves!
But Mrs Twitter was by no means bitter in her thoughts, and her conscience twitted her a little for having perhaps done Samuel a slight injustice.
Indeed she had done him injustice, for that estimable little man went about his inquiries after the lost Sammy with a lump as big as a walnut on the top of his head, and with a degree of persistent energy that might have made the superintendent himself envious.
“Not been at the office for two days, sir!” exclaimed Mr Twitter, repeating—in surprised indignation, for he could not believe it—the words of Sammy’s employer, who was a merchant in the hardware line.
“No, sir,” said the hardware man, whose face seemed as hard as his ware.
“Do—you—mean—to—tell—me,” said Twitter, with deliberate solemnity, “that my son Samuel has not been in this office for two days?”
“That is precisely what I mean to tell you,” returned the hardware man, “and I mean to tell you, moreover, that your son has been very irregular of late in his attendance, and that on more than one occasion he has come here drunk.”
“Drunk!” repeated Twitter, almost in a shout.
“Yes, sir, drunk—intoxicated.”
The hardware man seemed at that moment to Mr Twitter the hardest-ware man that ever confronted him. He stood for some moments aghast and speechless.