"How are you goin' to do it?" Pipette projected upon him a glance in which artless surprise, deferential admiration, and simple faith were exquisitely mingled,—a glance which, in after years, her husband once ruefully described as "good for a ten-pound note at any hour of the day,"—and replied simply— [Pg 19] "I thought you would manage all that, Pip. You're so bewwy clever!" [Pg 19] "All right," said Pip. "Let's do it." Thus it is that women make fools of the strongest men. They carried their soup carefully over to the little table beside the telephone. "I say," said Pip suddenly, "is he to have both basins?" Pipette's bounteous nature would gladly have sacrificed both Pip's lunch and her own, but she thought it wiser to concede this point. "No; one will do, I fink," she replied. "All right. You can drink half mine," said Pip. They gravely drank Pip's soup, turn about, and then applied themselves to the matter in hand. First, they lifted the receiver of the telephone from its rest and surveyed it doubtfully. There was a cup-shaped receptacle at one end into which soup could easily be poured, but the "tube" which connected it to the instrument was of very meagre dimensions. "Are you sure there's a pipe all the way?" inquired Pip doubtfully. "Certain. It's just the same as the Talking-Hole, only thinner. And the Talking-Hole has got a pipe all the way, 'cause don't you remember [Pg 20] you put a glass marble in one day when I told you not to, and it fell out in the hall?" [Pg 20] Pip's doubts were not quite satisfied even with this brilliant parallel. "It'll take a long time to get through," he said. He was fingering the silk-coated wire. "This pipe's awful thin. A marble would never get down it." "No, but the soup will twickle down all right," said Pipette, whose mind, busy
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