“You aren’t any mother for small children,” protested Eveley, with an argumentative wave of her hand. “You are born for business. Everybody says so. You do not know anything about babies.”
“Oh, yes I do,” cried Eileen ecstatically. “They have fat legs and dimples, and Betty sucks her thumb and has to be scolded, and Billy shouts ‘More jam’ and smudges it on his knees.”
“Are you giving up your position?”
“Oh, mercy, no. We have to live. Poor Jim only left them insurance and nothing else, and that did not last very long. I sent the other aunt a small check every month to help along and sort of heap coals of fire on her head at the same time. No, I shall have to work harder than ever now. But I get one seventy-five a month now,—and lots of families live on less.”
“Who will keep house then—Betty?”
“Don’t ask silly questions, Eveley, I am so nervous anyhow I hardly know what I am saying. You remember my laundress, don’t you? She is so nice and motherly and a Methodist and respectable and all that,—only old and hard up. She is coming to live with us,—she will have the den for her room, and is closing her cottage. She is to keep house and look after the babies while I am at work. She only charges twenty-five a month, so I can manage. The rent does seem high, fifty dollars,—but we need the room, though you all thought it was so extravagant for me to have such a large apartment to myself. But you know how I am, Eveley,—I like lots of space,—a place for everything, and everything where it belongs. So I was willing to stand the expense, and now it is a good thing I did. Come and see the baby room.”
Eveley duly admired the blue Red-Riding-Hoods and Jacks-and-Jills, exclaimed over the tiny white beds, and tiny white tables and chairs, and then said:
“You seem to be enjoying this experience, so I suppose you do not feel it is your duty, nor anything sordid like that?”
“Oh, no,” laughed Eileen. “I am doing it because I am just crazy about those babies, and I am sort of lonely, Eveley, though I have never realized it before. And when I think of coming home to a frolic with fat little babies in white dresses and blue ribbons,—well, I am so happy I could fairly cry.”
So Eveley put her arms around her, and kissed her, and offered a few suggestions about appropriate food for angel babies,—feeling very wise from her recent experience with Nathalie and Dan, and invited them all to go driving with her on Saturday afternoon, and mentally planned to send them an enormous box of candy in the morning after their arrival, and then said she must hurry back to work.