“He ain’t here yet; he’ll call this evening with a saucepan he’s been soldering. Thought I’d get the money while there was a chance of you being sober.”
Zeus Gildersedge straightened in his chair, fumbled in his pocket, and produced two coins. He laid them on the table with a melancholy and grudging deliberation as though he were disbursing thousands.
“Damn your insolence,” he said.
“Be civil yourself, master.”
The man’s eyes scanned the glass jug. He gripped it with one claw of a hand and stared at the woman blurred in the sunlight.
“You’ve been at the claret.”
The girl laughed a loud, quaking laugh of coarse merriment. She jerked forward, subsided on the man’s knees, poked her face into his.
“Taste my breath—now.”
“Get up with you.”
“Sha’n’t.”