"I think one of my friends' large pudding-basins has gone down-stairs."
"Really, now, sir? A large pudding-basin? No: I think not."
"But I can't find it up here, and it is wanted back."
"I put it on the drawers, Mrs. Glutch, ready to go back, last night."
"Perhaps the servant took it down-stairs to clean it?"
"Not at all likely, sir. If you will please to remember, you told her last Monday evening--or, no, I beg pardon--last Tuesday morning, that your friends cleaned up their own dishes, and that their things was not to be touched."
"Perhaps you took it down-stairs then yourself, Mrs. Glutch, by mistake?"
"I, sir! I didn't. I couldn't. Why should I? I think you said a large pudding-basin, sir?"
"I have ten large pudding-basins of my own, sir."
"I am very glad to hear it. Will you be so good as to look among them, and see if my friends' basin has not got mixed up with your crockery?"
Mrs. Glutch turns very red in the face, slowly scratches her muscular arms, as if she felt a sense of pugilistic irritation in them, looks at me steadily with a pair of glaring eyes, and leaves the room at the slowest possible pace. I wait and ring--wait and ring--wait and ring. After the third waiting and the third ringing, she reappears, redder of face and slower of march than before, with the missing article of property held out before her at arm's length.
"I beg pardon, sir," she says, "but is this anything like your friends' large pudding-basin?"
"Really, now, sir? Well, as you seem so positive, it isn't for me to contradict you. But I hope I shall give no offence if I mention that I had ten large pudding-basins of my own, and that I miss one of them."
With that last dexterous turn of speech, she gives up the basin with the air of a high-minded woman, who will resign her own property rather than expose herself to the injurious doubts of a morbidly suspicious man. When I add that the little scene just described takes place between us nearly every day, the reader will admit that, although Mrs. Glutch cannot prevent me from enjoying on her dirty premises the contraband luxury of a clean dinner, she can at least go great lengths towards accomplishing the secondary annoyance of preventing me from digesting it.