Serves only to discover sights of woe.”
He heard the words crackle in the flames. He said to himself gravely: “Sights of woe it surely is.”
He heard Evangeline begin to rattle the shaker of the kitchen stove and started from his hypnotized stare at the flames. It was time for him to beat it back upstairs if he didn’t want to be late. How he loathed his life-long slavery to the clock, that pervasive intimate negative opposed to every spontaneous impulse. “It’s the clock that is the nay-sayer to life,” he thought, as he climbed the cellar stairs. He hurried upstairs, dressed and began to shave.
In the midst of this last operation he heard lagging, soft little footsteps come into the bathroom behind him, and beyond his own lathered face in the glass he saw Stephen enter. Unconscious of observation, the little boy was gazing absently out of the window at the snow-covered branches of the maple tree. His father was so much surprised by the expression of that round baby face and so much interested in it that he stopped shaving, his razor in the air, peering at his little son through the glass darkly. Stephen was looking wistful! Yes, he was! Wistful and appealing! Wasn’t his lower lip quivering a little as though....
Stephen caught his father’s eye on him and started in surprise at being seen by somebody whose back was towards him.
“Hello there, Stevie,” said his father in an inviting tone. “How’s the old man to-day?”
Yes, Stephen’s lower lip was quivering! He came closer now and stood looking up earnestly into the soapy face of his father. “Say, Father,” he began, “you know my Teddy-bear—you know how....”
From below came a clear, restrained voice stating dispassionately, “Lester, you have only twelve minutes before it’s time to leave the house.” And then rebukingly, “Stephen, you mustn’t bother Father in the mornings when he has to hurry so. Either go back to bed this minute and keep warm or get dressed at once. You’ll take cold standing around in your pyjamas.”
The tone was reasonable. The logic unanswerable. But unlike Henry, Stephen did not shrink to smaller proportions under the reason and the logic. With the first sound of his mother’s voice, his usual square-jawed, pugnacious little mask had dropped over his face. “I’ll get dwessed when I get a-good-a-weady!” he announced loudly and belligerently, refreshed by his night’s sleep and instantly ready to raise an issue and fight it out.
“Stephen!” came from below in awful tones. Stephen sauntered away back into the bedroom with ostentatious leisureliness, his face black and scowling. Mother had once more stolen Teddy away from him during the night.