The Voice. Send him up. Tattie. Very good, sir. Then Tattie would cork up the tube and conduct Pipette, who had been sitting patiently in the Waiting Room, up the three stairs to the Consulting Room. Here she abruptly dropped the rôle of Mr. Evans, and announced firmly— "Now, Pip, it's my turn to be Father!" (Tattie had no father of her own, and imagined that the term merely implied a large, silent man who lived in a room full of fascinating playthings, opening Oven Doors and blowing down Talking-Holes.) After that Pip would be the patient, Pipette Mr. Evans, and Tattie Father, and the performance was repeated in extenso. Pipette, as the youngest, succeeded to the proud position of "Father" last of all. Each of them played the leading part in different fashion. Pip, enjoying every moment of his impersonation, always sat solemnly in the big swivel-chair at the table until the whistle blew, [Pg 13] when he would lounge across to the Talking-Hole and conduct the conversation as deliberately as possible. Pipette, on the other hand, possessed none of this artistic restraint, and was always standing on a chair, with her small ear ecstatically pressed against the mouth of the tube, by the time that Pip, in the character of Mr. Evans, was ready to converse with her. Consequently his withering blast, when it arrived, impinged straight upon Pipette's eardrum, frequently knocking her off her chair and invariably dulling her hearing for the afternoon. [Pg 13] Considerable freedom, too, was permitted in the interpretation of the part of Mr. Evans, especially in describing the patients' symptoms. In this respect the children were compelled to draw chiefly upon their own somewhat slight experience; for Mr. Evans, though he invariably gave the patients' names, was not as a rule entrusted with their complaints as well. Consequently the maladies which were shrieked up the tube so gleefully were those indigenous to small children, cooks and the like. When introduced by Pipette, the patient was usually suffering from "palpurtations, that bad!" (an echo of Cook); Tattie, whose pretty and interesting mamma affected fashionable complaints, would diagnose the case in hand as "nerves all in a jangle again"; while Pip, who was lacking in imagination [Pg 14] but possessed a retentive memory, invariably announced, with feeling, that the visitor was a victim of a "fearful pain in his (or
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