've got
a cold you get a bottle of Cough Linctus so long as you can produce a
substantial sniff. See? But Lord! they've no capacity for ideas, they
don't catch on; no Jump about the place, no Life. Live!--they trickle,
and what one has to do here is to trickle too--Zzzz."

"Ah!" said my mother.

"It doesn't suit me," said my uncle. "I'm the cascading sort."

"George was that," said my mother after a pondering moment.

My aunt Susan took up the parable with an affectionate glance at her
husband.

"He's always trying to make his old business jump," she said. "Always
putting fresh cards in the window, or getting up to something. You'd
hardly believe. It makes ME jump sometimes."

"But it does no good," said my uncle.

"It does no good," said his wife. "It's not his miloo..."

Presently they came upon a wide pause.

From the beginning of their conversation there had been the promise of
this pause, and I pricked my ears. I knew perfectly what was bound
to come; they were going to talk of my father. I was enormously
strengthened in my persuasion when I found my mother's eyes resting
thoughtfully upon me in the silence, and than my uncle looked at me and
then my aunt. I struggled unavailingly to produce an expression of meek
stupidity.

"I think," said my uncle, "that George will find it more amusing to have
a turn in the market-place than to sit here talking with us. There's a
pair of stocks there, George--very interesting. Old-fashioned stocks."

"I don't mind sitting here," I said.

My uncle rose and in the most friendly way led me through the shop. He
stood on his doorstep and jerked amiable directions to me.

"Ain't it sleepy, George, eh? There's the butcher's dog over there,
asleep in the road-half an hour from midday! If the last Trump sounded
I don't believe it would wake. Nobody would wake! The chaps up there in
the churchyard--they'd just turn over and say: 'Naar--you don't catch
us, you don't! See?'.... Well, you'll find the stocks just round that
corner."

He watched me out of sight.

So I never heard what they said about my father after all.

VI

When I returned, my uncle had in some remarkable way become larger and
central. "Tha'chu, George?" he cried, when the shop-door bell sounded.
"Come right through"; and I found him, as it were, in the chairman's
place before the draped grate.

The three of them regarded me.

"We have been talking of making you a chemist, George," said my uncle.