"Oh, shut up! Can't any one be bright but you?"
"That's all right; you were going to say it. Wasn't he, Father?" asks Harry, with the air of one appealing to the supreme authority.
"What?" Hilary had long since returned to his magazine.
"Say 'cheek.' Wasn't he going to?"
"Who?"
"James, of course."
"I trust not. It seems to me that it is one of the slang words your mother has requested you not to use."
"Wha—what is?"
"Cheek." Not much of a joke, certainly, but Hilary, looking with impenetrable gravity over his glasses at his son, when he really knows perfectly well what Harry is talking about, is funny. At any rate Harry stops to laugh, and the quarrel is a failure. Edith could have stopped the quarrel by simply enjoining peace, but she could not have done it without resort to parental authority.
One day James, ordinarily phlegmatic and self-controlled, ran through the house in a great state of dishevelment and distress in search of his mother, holding aloft a bloody finger and weeping hot tears of woe.