"If anybody asks _me_--" said Mr. Ransome. He interrupted himself to stare terribly at Mrs. Ransome, who was sending a signal to her son and a whisper, "Have a little slice of gingercake, Ran dear."
"If anybody asks me _my_ objection to a Tory Government, I'll put it for 'em," said Mr. Ransome, "in a nutshell."
"Let's have it, Fulleymore," said Mr. Randall.
And Mr. Ransome let him have it--in a nutshell.
"With a Tory Government you always, sooner or later, have a war. And who," said Mr. Ransome, "_wants_ war?"
Mr. Randall bowed and made a motion of his hand toward his brother-in-law, a complicated gesture which implied destruction of all Tory Governments, homage to Mr. Ransome, and dismissal of the subject as definitively settled by him.
Mrs. Ransome seized the moment to raise her eyebrows and the teapot toward Mrs. Randall, and to whisper again, surreptitiously, "Jest another little drain of tea?"
Then Ranny, who had tilted his chair most dangerously backward, was heard saying something. A bit of scrap, now and then, with other nations was, in Ranny's opinion, a jolly good thing. Kept you from gettin' Flabby. Kept you Fit.
Mr. Randall, in a large, forbearing manner, dealt with Ranny. He wanted to know whether he, Ranny, thought that the world was one almighty Poly. Gym.?
And Mr. Ransome answered: "That's precisely what he does think. Made for his amusement, the world is."
Ranny was young, and so they all treated him as if he were neither good nor wise.
And Ranny, desperately tilted backward, looked at them all with a smile that almost confirmed his father's view of his philosophy. He was working up for his great outbreak. He could feel the laughter struggling in his throat.
"I don't say," said Mr. Ransome, ignoring his son's folly, "that I'm complaining of this Boer War in especial. If anything"--he weighed it, determined, in his rectitude, to be just even to the war--"if anything we sold more of some things."
"Now what," said Mrs. Randall, "do you sell most of in time of war?"
"Sleepin' draughts, heart mixture, nerve tonic, stomach mixture, and so forth."
"And he can tell you," said Mr. Randall, "to a month's bookin' what meddycine he'll sell."
"What's more," said the chemist, with a sinister intonation, "I can tell who'll want 'em."
