"Well, Jane," he said.
I gathered that this was Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp, the wife who had
divorced him for systematic and ingrowing fiendishness on the ground
that he had repeatedly outraged her feelings by wearing a white
waistcoat with a dinner-jacket. She continued to look at him dumbly,
and then uttered a sort of strangled, hysterical laugh.
"Those legs!" she cried. "Those legs!"
Vincent Jopp flushed darkly. Even the strongest and most silent of us
have our weaknesses, and my employer's was the rooted idea that he
looked well in knickerbockers. It was not my place to try to dissuade
him, but there was no doubt that they did not suit him. Nature, in
bestowing upon him a massive head and a jutting chin, had forgotten to
finish him off at the other end. Vincent Jopp's legs were skinny.
"You poor dear man!" went on Mrs. Jane Jukes Jopp. "What practical
joker ever lured you into appearing in public in knickerbockers?"
"I don't object to the knickerbockers," said Mrs. Agnes Parsons Jopp,
"but when he foolishly comes out in quite a strong east wind without
his liver-pad----"
"Little Tinky-Ting don't need no liver-pad, he don't," said Mrs.
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