My wife thereupon whispered to me that the upset would not have mattered much if the soup was any like hers.
“Why not?” I queried, in some surprise, and anxious to learn as speedily as possible the chemical peculiarities of a lady’s toilet.
“Because then the dress would have been turned into a watered silk,” was the only answer I got.
It was some time before I saw the point, and then I smiled a dreary, weary smile, and remarked that I hoped the lady was able to re-dress herself, for I thought that she could get no redress from the proprietor—at least, that legal luminary, Pollock, C. B., so insinuated on one occasion.[74]
My wife grew fidgety because the waiters were somewhat tardy in filling her orders.
“Look,” she said, “at those lazy fellows! Half a dozen of them doing nothing, while we are kept waiting, still waiting.”
“Doubtless,” I replied, “they have been deeply impressed with the truth of that grand old Miltonic line:
‘They also serve who only stand to wait.’”
* * * * * *
While taking my post-prandial smoke, my interrogator of the previous evening again approached me, and asked, in a grumbling voice, if the landlord had a right to turn him out of one room, and put him into another.