There was trouble in Mrs. Frank Scherman's pretty little household.
The trouble was, it did not stay little. Baby Karen was only six weeks old, and Marmaduke was only three years; great, splendid fellow though he was at that, and "galumphing round,"—as his mother said, who read nonsense to Sinsie out of "Wonderland," and the "Looking Glass,"—upon a stick.
Of course she read nonsense, and talked nonsense,—the very happiest and most reckless kind,—in her nursery; this bright Sin Scherman, who "had lived on nonsense," she declared, "herself, until she was twenty years old; and it did her good." Therefore, on physiological principles, she fed it to her little ones. It agreed with the Saxon constitution. There was nothing like understanding your own family idiosyncrasies.
Everything quaint and odd came naturally to them; even their names.
Asenath: Marmaduke: Kerenhappuch.
"I didn't go about to seek or invent them," said Mrs. Scherman, with grave, innocent eyes and lifted brows. "I didn't name myself, in the first place; did I? Sinsie had to be Sinsie; and then—how am I accountable for the blessed luck that gave me for best friends dear old Marmaduke Wharne and Kerenhappuch Craydocke?"
But down in the kitchen, and up in the nursery, there was disapproval.
"It was bad enough," they said,—these orderers of household administration,—"when there was two. And no second nurse-girl, and no laundress!"
"If Mrs. Scherman thinks I'm going to put up with baby-clothes slopping about all days of the week, whenever a nurse can get time from tending, and the parlor girl havin' to accommodate and hold the child when she gets her meals, and nobody to fetch out the dishes and give me a chance to clear up, I can just tell her it's too thin!"
"Ye'r a fool to stay," was the expostulation of an outside friend, calling one day to see and condole with and exasperate the aforesaid nurse. "When ther's places yer might have three an' a half a week, an' a nurse for the baby separate, an' not a stitch to wash, not even yer own things! If they was any account at all, they'd keep a laundress!"