⸺“Now what can their two noddles be about?” cried my father - - etc. - - - -
I dare say, said my mother, they are making fortifications⸺
⸻Not on Mrs. Wadman’s premises! cried my father, stepping back⸺
I suppose not: quoth my mother.
I wish, said my father, raising his voice, the whole science of fortification at the devil, with all its trumpery of saps, mines, blinds, gabions, fausse-brays and cuvetts⸻
⸺They are foolish things⸺said my mother.
Now she had a way, which, by the by, I would this moment give away my purple jerkin, and my yellow slippers into the bargain, if some of your reverences would imitate—and that was, never to refuse her assent and consent to any proposition my father laid before her, merely because she did not understand it, or had no ideas of the principal word or term of art, upon which the tenet or proposition rolled. She contented herself with doing all that her godfathers and godmothers promised for her—but no more; and so would go on using a hard word twenty years together—and replying to it too, if it was a verb, in all its moods and tenses, without giving herself any trouble to enquire about it.
This was an eternal source of misery to my father, and broke the neck, at the first setting out, of more good dialogues between them, than could have done the most petulant contradiction⸺the few which survived were the better for the cuvetts ⸺