“Why to me?” I coldly inquired.
“It wouldn’t be of much use to me,” he retorted. And I resented his basking thus openly in the fires of martyrdom.
“In that case,” I asked, “what satisfaction are you getting out of your new position?”
That sent the color ebbing from his face again, and he looked at me as I’d never seen him look at me before. We’d both been mauled by the paw of Destiny, and we were both nursing ragged nerves and oversensitized spirits, facing each other as irritable as teased rattlers, ready to thump rocks with our head. More than once I’d heard Dinky-Dunk proclaim that the right sort of people never bickered and quarreled. And I remembered Theobald Gustav’s pet aphorism to the effect that Hassen machts nichts. But life had its limits. And I wasn’t one of those pink-eared shivery little white mice who could be intimidated into tears by a frown of disapproval from my imperial mate. And married life, after all, is only a sort of guerre d’usure.
“And you think you’re doing the right thing?” I demanded of my husband, not without derision, confronting him with a challenge on my face and a bawling Pee-Wee on my hip.
Dinky-Dunk sniffed.
“That child seems to have its mother’s disposition,” he murmured, ignoring my question.
“The prospects of its acquiring anything better from its father seem rather remote,” I retorted, striking blindly. For that over-deft adding of insult to injury had awakened every last one of my seven sleeping devils. It was an evidence of cruelty, cold and calculated cruelty. And by this time little waves of liquid fire were running through my tingling body.
“Then I can’t be of much service to this family,” announced Dinky-Dunk, with his maddening note of mockery.
“I fail to see how you can be a retriever for a flabby-minded idler and the head of this household at one and the same time,” I said out of the seething crater-fogs of my indignation.