"Professor Booth," he says, seeing he has got to say something or else Jane will think the worse of him, "I am—"
"Keep still," says the perfessor, real quiet. "I'll tend to you in a minute or two. YOU don't count for much. This thing is mostly between me and my wife."
When he talks so decided I thinks mebby that perfessor has got something into him besides science after all. Jane, she looks kind o' surprised herself. But she says nothing, except:
"What are you going to do, Frederick?" And she laughs one of them mean kind of laughs, and looks at Henry like she wanted him to spunk up a little more, and says: "What CAN you do, Frederick?"
Frederick, he says, not excited a bit:
"There's quite a number of things I COULD do that would look bad when they got into the newspapers. But it's none of them, unless one of you forces me to it." Then he says:
"You DID want to see the children, Jane?"
She nodded.
"Jane," he says, "can't you see I'm the better man?"
The perfessor, he was woke up after all them years of scientifics, and he didn't want to see her go. "Look at him," he says, pointing to the feller with the brown beard, "he's scared stiff right now."