But, instead of saying that, he stood looking at me, with a tragically humble sort of contriteness. Then, without quite knowing he was doing it, he brought his hands together in a sort of clinch, with his face twisted up in an odd little grimace of revolt, as though he stood ashamed to let me see that his lip was quivering.
“It’s such a rotten deal,” he almost moaned, “to you and the kiddies.”
“Oh, we’ll survive it,” I said with a grin that was plainly forced.
“But you don’t seem to understand what it means,” he protested. His impatience, I could see, was simply that of a man overtaxed. And I could afford to make allowance for it.
“I understand that it’s almost an hour past supper-time, my Lord, and that if you don’t give me a chance to stoke up I’ll bite the edges off the lamp-shade!”
I was rewarded by just the ghost of a smile, a smile that was much too wan and sickly to live long.
“All right,” announced Dinky-Dunk, “I’ll be down in a minute or two.”
There was courage in that, I saw, for all the listlessness of the tone in which it had been uttered. So I went skipping down-stairs and closed my baby grand and inspected the table and twisted the glass bowl that held my nasturtium-buds about, to the end that the telltale word of “Salt” embossed on its side would not betray the fact that it had been commandeered from the kitchen-cabinet. Then I turned up the lamp and smilingly waited until my lord and master seated himself at the other side of the table, grateful beyond words that we had at least that evening alone and were not compelled to act up to a part before the eyes of strangers.
Yet it was anything but a successful meal. Dinky-Dunk’s pretense at eating was about as hollow as my pretense at light-heartedness. We each knew that the other was playing a part, and the time came when to keep it up was altogether too much of a mockery.
“Dinky-Dunk,” I said after a silence that was too abysmal to be ignored, “let’s look this thing squarely in the face.”