‘Not little tiny girls like Dot,’ urged mother, ‘you mustn’t be hard on her, Larrie, she’ll be all she should be in time.’
‘But not if I don’t teach her,’ he insisted; ‘why, how can she?’
‘It comes of itself,’ the mother answered.
But a dark look of recollective annoyance spread over Larrie’s brow.
‘She forgot baby’s teething necklace three days last week, she’s always forgetting things,’ he said.
Then he too remembered the law, and ate the rest of his orange in silence.
‘I wish you would not come down to the cottage quite so often,’ was the remark with which he broke a meditation that had [p 38] ]involved criss-crossed brows and five slow minutes. A little odd sound broke from the mother’s lips. Larrie looked up and saw she was white under her brown and her eyes were piteous.
He crossed over to her with two swift steps. He knelt down beside her chair, and put both his arms round her thin waist.
‘How dare you, mum, how dare you have such thoughts!’ he said. He kissed her several times in an eager, boyish way. ‘You know you could never come too often for me, you know you are more to me than my own mother ever was. It’s only Dot, don’t you see? She’s getting too dependent, mum. We’ll have to let her stand alone a little more. Peggie spoils her, you spoil her—I even spoil her myself—mightn’t it be a good thing to let her do things by herself for a change, just for a trial, mum? And she shall come here of course. Only, don’t you come to the cottage for a bit, and do all the things she leaves undone in that quiet little way you have.’
[p 39]
]‘Not even Saturdays, Larrie? That’s the hardest day.’