He walks—no, he marches—half way down the front garden path, with his head high in the air and his chest stuck out, and his military cane fiercely flourished in his right hand. Suddenly he stops, stamps with one foot, knocks up the hinder part of the brim of his extremely curly hat with his left hand, and begins to scratch at that singularly disagreeable-looking roll of fat, red flesh in the back of his neck (which scratching, I may observe, in parentheses, is always a sure sign, in the case of this horrid man, that a lost domestic idea has suddenly come back to him).
He waits a moment in the ridiculous position just described, then wheels round on his heel, looks up at the first-floor window, and, instead of going back into the house to mention what he has forgotten, bawls out fiercely from the middle of the walk:
“Matilda!”
I hear his wife’s voice—a shockingly shrill one; but what can you expect of a woman who has been seen, over and over again, in a slatternly striped wrapper, as late as two o’clock in the afternoon?—I hear his wife’s voice answer from inside the house:
“Yes, dear.”
“I said it was a south wind.”
“Yes, dear.”
“It isn’t a south wind.”
“Lor’, dear.”
“It’s a sou’east. I won’t have Georgina taken out to-day. (Georgina is one of the first Mrs. Namby’s family, and they are all weak in the chest.) Where’s nurse?”