Lady Osborne entirely refused to notice the sarcastic intent of this.
“Well, to be sure, we’ve all got to take our risks,” she said. “There’d be no sense in passing your life wrapped up in cotton-wool, and waiting for the doctor!”
“Why, and you used to ride too, when you was a lad, Alf,” said her husband. “You’re making Dora laugh at you. And I don’t wonder: I could laugh myself!”
“I think you’d both be the better for an operation, you and Maria,” he said. “I should have a bit of humour put in, instead of a bit of tumour taken out. Not but what it’s a far more serious affair. I doubt if either of you would get over it.”
“Well, and it’s you who talked about my tumour this time,” said Lady Osborne triumphantly.
This was too much for Alf: he walked shufflingly back to the house, leaving his sister-in-law in possession of the field. But she used her victory nobly, with pity for the conquered.
Lady Osborne looked round in a discreet and penetrating manner after he had gone and was out of hearing.
“Dora, my dear, you mustn’t mind what Alf says,” she remarked with much acuteness. “He gets a bit sour now and then, and I’m sure I don’t wonder, with his lumbago, and no one to look after him. If only he had found a nice girl to look after him when he was young! Poor old Alf! But you can take it from me as knows him, he doesn’t really mean all he says. It’s his joke, and I’m not one to quarrel with a joke, and bless him, why shouldn’t he joke in his own way just as the rest of us do? And if sometimes he seems a bit ill-humoured over his joke--well, you let him get his bit of ill-humour off his mind, and he’ll be all the better for it. I never take no notice and it don’t hurt me. ‘Alf and his joke,’ I say over to myself, and no harm done.”
“Rum old cove is Alf,” said her husband; “he seems sometimes to want to quarrel with us all. But it takes two to make a quarrel, and he’ll have hard work to find the second in this house, if I know who lives in it. And he was just as anxious as he could be, Maria, when you was at your worst in the summer, telephoning five and six times in the day, till I said down the tube, ‘Maria’s love, and she’s asleep till morning.’ And what it’ll be when Dora here----”