At that moment Tony returned. He really was ashamed of the doctor finding him in bed, whether as a breach of manners or of propriety was not plain. Possibly the latter. He has an acute sense of decency, though its rules and regulations are not the same as those of the people he calls gentry. Our conversation here would hardly suit a drawing-room. Tony, if he comes in wet, thinks nothing of stripping down to his shirt. But, curiously enough, one of his chief complaints about the people who hire boats, is their occasionally unclean conversation. "The likes o' us 'ould never think of saying what they du. Me, I didn' know nort about half the things they say till I wer grow'd up an' learnt it from listening to the likes o' they. Yu'd hear bad language wi' us an' plain speaking, but never what some o' they talks about when they got no one to hear 'em 'cept us they hires, an' they thinks us don't matter." Tony is right, I believe. Most of the impropriety I used to hear at school, university, and in the smoking room, though often little but a reaction against silly conventions, a tilt against whited sepulchres,--was well-named _smut_. It was furtive, a distortion of life's facts and inimical therefore to life. Impropriety here, on the other hand, is a recognition of life's facts, an expression of life, a playful ebullition. Tony, when he came in, enquired of Mam 'Idger what she had done with the picture. "Did Rosie die in the summer?" I asked, remembering how the children will run out to the milkman with a dirty can unless a sharp eye is kept upon them, and how also the larder is fixed up over the main drain. "Her died late in the autumn with convulsions from teething," Mrs Widger replied. "An' her didn't ought to ha' died then but for Dr Brown. When her was took ill, proper bad, I sent one of the maidens for Dr Bayliss, but he was out to the country for they didn' know how long. So off I sends the maid to Dr Brown, an' he sends back a message as he cuden' attend Dr Bayliss's patients wi'out Dr Bayliss asked him. Certainly 'twas late; but my blood jest boiled, an' I took Rosie into Grannie's an' goes up myself. Rosie didn' belong to no doctor. Her'd never had one. Howsbe-ever, Dr Brown says to me the same as he'd told the maid, that he cuden' come. An' then he says, 'My good woman, I _won't_ come!' Jest like that! My flare was up; I wer jest about to let fly my mind at 'en--an' I remembered Rosie lying in convulsions to Grannie's, an' flew out o' his house like a mad thing. Rosie wer all but dead. Her was gone when Dr Bayliss come'd next morning."