Bob drove her back: “St. Petersburg's a loathsome place.”
Mrs. Chater tried to squeeze through. “So _gay_, they say.”
Bob slammed the gate. “I wish you'd _tell_ me something instead of expecting _me_ to do all the talking. I want to hear all that's been going on here while I've been away, but I'm hanged if I can find out.”
A little mortified, Mrs. Chater said: “I've hardly seen you, dear, except at meals”--then threw the onus for her son's lack of local gossip upon her husband. Addressing him, “You've been with Bob all the morning,” she told him. “I wonder you haven't given him all the news. But, there! I suppose you've done nothing but question him about what business he's done!”
Mr. Chater, startled at the novelty of being drawn into table conversation while his son and his wife were present, dropped his spoon with a splash into his soup, wiped his coat, frowned at the parlour-maid, cleared his throat, and, to gain time to determine whether he had courage to say that which was burning within him, threw out an “Eh?” for his pursuing wife to Worry.
Mrs. Chater pounced upon it; shook it. “What I said was that I suppose you've been doing nothing but question poor Bob about what he has done for the firm while he's been away.”
Mr. Chater nerved himself to declare his mind. “There wasn't very much to question him about,” he said.
His words--outcome of views forcibly expressed by his partners in Mincing Lane that morning--were the foolhardy action of one who pokes a tigress with a stick.
The tigress shook herself. “Now, I wonder what you mean by _that_?” she challenged.
Mr. Chater dropped the stick; precipitantly fled. “Of course it was all new to Bob,” he granted, throwing a bone.
Very much to his alarm the tigress ignored the bone; rushed after him. “All you seem to think about,” cried she, “is making the boy slave. He's never had a proper holiday since he left school, and yet the very first time he goes off to see the world you must be fidgeting yourself to death all the time that he's not pushing the firm sufficiently; and immediately he comes back you must start cross-examining just as if he was an office-boy--not a word about his health or his pleasure. Oh, no! of course not!”