Certain it is that I myself overheard another of Bill's grim
pleasantries. He was explaining to madame that they must apprentice
their offspring to the engineering trade. "I wanter mike Lil' Bill a
mowter chap, so's 'e can oil the ball-bearings of me fancy leg wot I'm
ter get at Roehampton." The "fancy leg" ended by being the favourite
theme of Bill's disgraceful extravaganzas. He would announce to Sister,
when she was dressing his stump, that he had been studying means of
earning his living in the future, and had decided to become a professor
of roller skating. He would loudly tell his wife that she would never
again be able to summons him for assault by kicking: the fancy leg would
not give the real one sufficient purchase for an effective kick. And she
was not to complain, in future, about his cold feet against her back in
bed: there would be only one cold foot, the other would be unhitched and
on the floor. And of course there were endless jokes about what had been
done with the amputated leg, whether it had got a tombstone, and so
forth: some of the suggestions going a trifle beyond what good taste, in
more fastidious coteries, would have thought permissible.
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