MRS. HIGGINS [at last, conversationally] Will it rain, do you think?
LIZA. The shallow depression in the west of these islands is likely to
move slowly in an easterly direction. There are no indications of any
great change in the barometrical situation.
FREDDY. Ha! ha! how awfully funny!
LIZA. What is wrong with that, young man? I bet I got it right.
FREDDY. Killing!
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. I'm sure I hope it won't turn cold. There's so much
influenza about. It runs right through our whole family regularly every
spring.
LIZA [darkly] My aunt died of influenza: so they said.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [clicks her tongue sympathetically]!!!
LIZA [in the same tragic tone] But it's my belief they done the old
woman in.
MRS. HIGGINS [puzzled] Done her in?
LIZA. Y-e-e-e-es, Lord love you! Why should she die of influenza? She
come through diphtheria right enough the year before. I saw her with my
own eyes. Fairly blue with it, she was. They all thought she was dead;
but my father he kept ladling gin down her throat til she came to so
sudden that she bit the bowl off the spoon.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [startled] Dear me!
LIZA [piling up the indictment] What call would a woman with that
strength in her have to die of influenza? What become of her new straw
hat that should have come to me? Somebody pinched it; and what I say
is, them as pinched it done her in.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. What does doing her in mean?
HIGGINS [hastily] Oh, that's the new small talk. To do a person in
means to kill them.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL [to Eliza, horrified] You surely don't believe that
your aunt was killed?
LIZA. Do I not! Them she lived with would have killed her for a
hat-pin, let alone a hat.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. But it can't have been right for your father to
pour spirits down her throat like that. It might have killed her.
LIZA. Not her. Gin was mother's milk to her. Besides, he'd poured so
much down his own throat that he knew the good of it.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. Do you mean that he drank?
LIZA. Drank! My word! Something chronic.
MRS. EYNSFORD HILL. How dreadful for you!
LIZA. Not a bit. It never did him no harm what I could see. But then he
did not keep it up regular. [Cheerfully] On the burst, as you might
say, from time to time. And always more agreeable when he had a drop
in. When he was out of work, my mother used to give him fourpence and
tell him to go out and not come back until he'd drunk himself cheerful
and loving-like. There's lots of women has to make their husbands drunk
to make them fit to live with. [Now quite at her ease] You see, it's
like this. If a man has a bit of a conscience, it always takes him when
he's sober; and then it makes him low-spirited. A drop of booze just
takes that off and makes him happy. [To Freddy, who is in convulsions
of suppressed laughter] Here! what are you sniggering at?