If there are gallery gods in heaven, and angels with a melodramatic taste (as there must be, for how else could we have acquired it?), they must have shaken the cloudy rafters with applause. Only one touch was needed to perfect the scene, and that was for the First and Second Villains to slink off, cursing and muttering, “Foiled again!”
But these villains were not professionals, and they had not been rehearsed. They were like childish actors in a juvenile production at five pins per admission. An unexpected line threw them into complete disorder.
Connery turned to Gilfoyle. “Did you ever lamp this old lady before?”
Gilfoyle answered, stoutly enough, “I never laid eyes on her.”
Connery was about to order Mrs. Thropp out of the room as an impostor, but she would not be denied her retort.
“O' course he never laid eyes on me. If he had have he'd never tried to pull the wool over that innocent baby's eyes; and if I'd ever laid eyes on him I'd have run him out of the country before I'd ever have let my child look at him a second time.”
Connery made one last struggle: “What proof have you got that you're her mother?”
“Ask my husband here.”
“What good is his word in such a matter?”
Connery did not mean this as in any sense a reflection on Mrs. Thropp's marital integrity, but she took it so. Now, in Nimrim the question of fidelity is not dealt with lightly, at least in repartee. Mrs. Thropp emitted a roar of scandalized virtue and would have attacked the young men with her fists if her husband, who should have attacked them in her stead, had not clung to her, murmuring: