It was perfect. In the summer a house was taken at Cromer by the sea and there, all through the fine weather, Miss Prescott was installed with her charges. Their mother had three weeks from Field’s in the summer and she and their father would spend the whole of it, and often week-ends, at Cromer idling and playing with their darlings. That was jolly. The children associated nothing whatever but happiness with their parents.
In the other months of the year their mother was immensely occupied with her work at Field’s, developing beyond expectation; and their father early and late with his work in the Temple, his esteem by solicitors and by litigants almost beyond his time to satisfy. Their father was much paragraphed in the social journals, and their mother also. The paragraphs said their father was making a “princely fortune” at the Bar and never told of him without telling also of his wife. They described her as “of Field’s Bank” and always drove the word “unique” hand in hand with every mention of her parts. “Unique personality”; “unique position”; “unique among professional women”; “unique,” said one, “in combining notable beauty and rare business acumen; an office which she attends daily and a charming home; a profession, three beautiful children, and a brilliant husband.”
The syntax is weak, but the truth is in it and those children were to be envied in their mother.
Miss Prescott, when she came, did not displace the Muffet. She was installed additional to the Muffet; and as touching the modern principles relating to children she very soon told Muffet a thing or two not previously dreamt of in the Muffet philosophy but having, thence forward, occasional place in the Muffet nightmares.
The Muffet, however, was of lymphatic character, with, as her most constant desire, the desire not to be “plagued.” She was one of those people who are for ever declaring that they never eat anything, who at meals, indeed, appear to eat very little, but who between meals, are eating all day long. At all hours of the day the Muffet jaws, like the jaws of a ruminant, were steadily munching, munching. When Benji was three Muffet was getting distinctly fat. On a corner of the night nursery mantelpiece she had a photographic group of her parents and of an uncle and aunt who lived with her parents. These four were very fat and one evening the children’s father made a remark about this portrait that made their mother laugh delightedly.
Benji was in his cot. Huggo had just come from his bath and was having his toes wiped by his mother because he declared Muffet had not dried them properly. He said Muffet groaned when she stooped.
His mother said, “You know, Harry, Muffet is getting fat. Have you noticed it?”
Their father was bent almost double swinging Doda between his legs, the stomach of Doda reposing on the palms of his joined hands and Doda squealing ecstatically.
Their father said, “I have. Go and look at that photograph, Rosalie, and you’ll see why. Look at what her people are. Muffet’s broadening down from precedent to precedent.”
It made their mother laugh. The children didn’t know why it made her laugh, but they laughed with her. They always did, or with their father when he laughed. And there was always lots of jolly laughter when their father and mother came up to the nurseries.