Mrs. Roberts, who sinks into a chair and regards the unhappy man with a look of tender compassion: "You poor thing, I've almost a mind to let you!"
Roberts, heroically: "No, it wouldn't do, Agnes. I must—ow, ugh, ow—go. Ugh, ow, ugh!" He abandons himself to a succession of abysmal yawns, in which the sequence of his ideas is altogether lost.
Mrs. Roberts: "Well, then, I shall have to trust you." She gathers her train up for departure, and moves slowly towards the door. "I don't think I've forgotten anything. Let me see: fan, handkerchief, both gloves; pins, because you're never sure that they've put enough, and you don't know where you'll come apart; head scarf, yes, I've got that on; fur boots, I've got them on. I really believe I'm all here. But I shouldn't be, Edward, if it were not for the system I put into everything; and I do wish, dear, that you'd try it once, just to please me!"
Roberts, very drowsily: "Try what, Agnes?"
Mrs. Roberts: "Why, getting what you have to do by heart, and repeating it over. If you could only bring yourself to say: Both girls out; me alone with the children; Willis at ten; mustn't go to sleep; last half, anyway; Mrs. Miller awfully angry. There! If you could say that after me, I could go feeling so much easier! Won't you do it, Edward? I know it has a ridiculous sound, but—"
Roberts, yawning: "How am I to dress?"
Mrs. Roberts: "Edward! Well, I always will say that you're perfectly inspired! To think of my forgetting the most important thing, after all! Oh, I do believe there is an overruling Providence, I don't care what the agnostics pretend. Why, it's to be evening dress for the men, of course! Mrs. Miller would do it to be different from Mrs. Curwen, who let you come in your cutaways, even if it wasn't the regular thing; and she's gone around ever since saying it was the most rowdy, Bohemian thing she ever heard of, and she might as well have had beer, at once."
Roberts: "Who?"
Mrs. Roberts: "Why, Mrs. Miller."
Roberts: "Mrs. Miller going to have beer?"