“Be, I trust, just as capable of distinguishing between the permitted and the non-permitted as I am to-day,” was my ready retort.
“Oh, oh,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh, shaking her head and smiling as though she were talking to a child or a feeble-minded; and turning her camera on to me she took my photograph.
“Pray why,” I inquired with justifiable heat, “should I be photographed without my consent?”
“Because,” she said, “you look so deliciously cross. I want to have you in my scrap-book like that. You looked then exactly like a baby I know.”
“Which baby?” I asked, frowning and at a loss how to meet this kind of thing conversationally. And there was Edelgard, all ears; and if a wife sees her husband being treated disrespectfully by other women is it not very likely that she soon will begin to treat him so herself? “Which baby?” I asked; but knew myself inadequate.
“Oh, a perfectly respectable baby,” said Mrs. Menzies-Legh carelessly, putting her camera down and going on with her breakfast, “but irritable and exacting about things like bottles.”
“But I do not see what I have to do with bottles,” I said nettled.
“Oh, no—you haven’t. Only it looks at its nurse just like you did then if they’re late, or not full enough.”
“But I did not look at its nurse,” I said angrily, becoming still more so as they all (including my wife) laughed.
I rose abruptly. “I will go and smoke,” I said.