He scrambled to his feet and padded to her side on rosy bare feet. "Mother, you'll have to 'tay here, anyhow. You know I can't do those back buttons. And I always get my drawer-legs twisted up with my both legs inside my one leg."
Marise compromised. "Well, yes, if you'll hurry. But not if you dawdle. Mother has a lot to do this morning. Remember, I won't help you with a single thing you can do yourself."
The child obediently unbuttoned his pajamas and stepping out of them reached for his undershirt. His mother, looking at him, fell mentally on her knees before the beautiful, living body. "Oh, my son, the straight, strong darling! My precious little son!" She shook with that foolish aching anguish of mothers, intolerable. . . . "Why must he stop being so pure, so safe? How can I live when I am no longer strong enough to protect him?"
Mark remarked plaintively, shrugging himself into the sleeves of his shirt, "I've roden on a horse, and I've roden on a dog, and I've even roden on a cow, but I've never roden on a camel, and I want to."
The characteristic Mark-like unexpectedness of this made her smile.
"You probably will, some day," she said, sitting down.
"But I've never even sawn a camel," complained Mark. "And Elly and Paul have, and a elephant too."
"Well, you're big enough to be taken to the circus this year," his mother promised him. "This very summer we'll take you."
"But I want to go now!" clamored Mark, with his usual disregard of possibilities, done in the grand style.
"Don't dawdle," said his mother, looking around for something to read, so that she would seem less accessible to conversation. She found the newspaper under her hand, on the table, and picked it up. She had only glanced at the head-lines yesterday. It took a lot of moral courage to read the newspapers in these days. As she read, her face changed, darkened, set.