“It’s just my negligence!” I remarked, scornfully, to my drenched surroundings; “just my negligence, and now I shall have to hunt for those cows, and in this rain that shuts everything out it will be like looking for a needle in a haymow.”
I took down the pail, seeming to take down an entire chorus of singing water witches with it, and retraced my steps to the house. Even this simple act was performed with some difficulty, for again I stepped on the mackintosh and nearly fell.
“You’ve been very quick with the milking, and breakfast’s all ready,” Jessie remarked, cheerfully, as I entered, and then, catching sight of the empty pail, she exclaimed, “Why, what’s the matter?”
When I told her, she said, reproachfully, “Leslie, of course I supposed that you would put up the bars after we had finished milking last night!”
I am afraid that I was cross as well as tired: “Why, ‘of course,’ Jessie? Why is it, can you tell me, that there is always some one member of a family who is supposed, quite as a matter of course, to make good the short-comings and long-goings of all the others? To straighten out the domestic tangles, to remember, always remember, what the others forget; to be good-tempered when others are ill-tempered; to—”
Jessie laid a brown little hand on my shoulder, checking the torrent of my eloquence; she laid her cheek against my own for a passing instant.
“That’s all easily answered, Leslie dear. The some one that you describe is the soul of a house. When a house has the misfortune not to have such an one in it, it has no soul; the other members are merely forms, moving forms, with impulses.”
I knew that she meant to compliment me, but I would not appear to know it.
“I suppose, then,” I returned, with affected resentment, “that I am a form with impulses. One of the impulses just now is to eat breakfast.”
“Me hundry; me eat breakfuss, too,” proclaimed a shrill, familiar voice at my elbow. I had already taken my seat at the table.