"What for, papa?"
"For me to hear. Off we go! Who's going to be married?"
"You see, he was listening all the time. I shouldn't tell him, if I were you. Your father is really unendurable. And he gets worse." Thus the lady of the house.
"What does your mother say?" There is a shade of asperity in the Professor's voice.
"Says you were listening all the time, papa. So you were!" This is from Lætitia's younger sister, Theeny. Her name was Athene. Her brother Egerton called her "Gallows Athene"—an offensive perversion of the name of the lady she was called after. Her mother had carefully taught all her children contempt for their father from earliest childhood. But toleration of his weaknesses—etymology, and so on—had taken root in spite of her motherly care, and the Professor was on very good terms with his offspring. He negatived Theeny amiably.
"No, my dear, I was like Mrs. Cluppins. The voices were loud, and forced themselves upon my ear. But as you all spoke at once, I have no idea what anybody said. My question was conjectural—purely conjectural. Is anybody going to marry anybody? I don't know."
"What is your father talking about over there? Is he going to help that tongue or not? Ask him." For a peculiarity in this family was that the two heads of it always spoke to one another through an agent. So clearly was this understood that direct speech between them, on its rare occasions, was always ascribed by distant hearers to an outbreak of hostilities. If either speaker had addressed the other by name, the advent of the Sergeant-at-Arms would have been the next thing looked for. On this occasion Lætitia's literal transmission of "Are you going to help the tongue or not, papa?" recalled his wandering mind to his responsibilities. Sally's liver-wing—she was the visitor—was pleading at his elbow for its complement of tongue.
But soon a four-inch space intervened between the lonely tongue-tip on the dish and what had once been, in military language, its base of operations. Everybody that took tongue had got tongue.
"Well, then, how about who's married whom?" Thus the Professor, resuming his hand-rubbing, and neglecting the leg of a fowl.