I—CHANGE OF GOVERNMENT
“Boots!” he roared, for the second time. His wife, opening the kitchen door, looked in, and surveyed him.
“If I have to order you,” said Mr. Baynes, speaking with great distinctness, “to come and take off my boots again, I shall dock half a crown off your weekly allowance to-morrow.”
She did not answer.
“My best plan,” he went on, “will be to draw it all up in black and white, so that we can have a clear and proper understandin’ one with the other. We must have a proper system of fines, same as they do in every well-regulated business. Fetch the pen and ink and paper.”
“How would it be to fetch it for yourself?”
He stared at her amazedly. Searching his pockets, he found there a small memorandum-book and a short piece of pencil.
“I’m going to keep calm with you,” he said deliberately, “because, so far as I can see, you’ve taken leave, for the present, of your senses. You’ll be sorry for it when you come back to ’em. Now then, let’s make out a list. ‘For not answering when called, one shilling.’”
He wrote this carefully on a page, regarding it with satisfaction at the finish. “See what that means? That means, for every time you pretend to be deaf when I shout at you, you’ll be docked a bob at the end of the week.”
“I see.”