"'Oh, we _will_, sir,' and they got out one of those invalid chairs and started to lift him up. Course I wanted to take one end, but they wouldn't hear of it. 'If you please, we like carrying the master, sir,' and all that kind of thing; and they fussed him in and fiddled with his legs, snapping at one another for being rough as if they were the two women taking their disputed baby up to old Solomon.
"They'd scarcely got on to the stairs when the front door opened and in walks his wife. My word, I thought they were going to drop him. She says in a voice as though she was biting a chip off an ice block, 'Mark, is it _really_ necessary--' Then she saw me and took her teeth out of the ice. 'Oh, it's Mr. Hapgood, isn't it? How very nice! Staying to lunch, of course? Do let's come into the drawing-room.' Very nice and affable. I always rather liked her. And we went along, I being rather captured and doing the polite in my well-known matinée idol manner, you understand; and I heard old Sabre saying, 'Well, let me out of the damned thing, can't you? Help me out of the damn thing'; and presently hobbled in and joined us, and soon after that lunch, exquisitely cooked and served and all very nice, too.
"Well, as I say, old man, I always rather liked his wife. I--always--rather--liked--her. But somehow, as we went on through lunch, and then on after that, I didn't like her quite so much. Not--quite--so--much. I don't know. Have you ever seen a woman unpicking a bit of sewing? Always looks rather angry with it, I suppose because it's got to be unpicked. They sort of flip the threads out, as much as to say, '_Come_ out of it, drat you. _That's_ you, drat you.' Well, that was the way she spoke to old Sabre. Sort of snipped off the end of what he was saying and left it hanging, if you follow me. That was the way she spoke to him when she did speak to him. But for the most part they hardly spoke to one another at all. I talked to her, or I talked to him, but the conversation never got triangular. Whenever it threatened to, _snip!_ she'd have his corner off and leave him floating. Tell you what it was, old man, I jolly soon saw that the reason old Sabre was so jolly anxious for me to stay to lunch was because meals without dear old me or some other chatty intellectual were about as much like a feast of reason and a flow of soul as a vinegar bottle and a lukewarm potato on a cold plate. Similarly with the exuberance of his greeting of me. I hate to confess it, but it wasn't so much splendid old me he had been so delighted to see as any old body to whom he could unloose his tongue without having the end of his nose snipped off.