‘No,’ Larrie said. ‘Be a good little mum and leave her to me.’
He stood up, all his six feet and odd inches, his young face grave, resolute, his eyes full of seriousness.
‘He looks like a man fit to be trusted with his own wife,’ the little mother told herself as she looked up at him.
Aloud, she said in a tone of wistful resignation. ‘Very well, Larrie, you will be gentle with her, I know—she’s such a little thing.’
Larrie walked home. He was thinking all the way of the new leaf he was about to turn. Dot had behaved in an altogether unforgivable manner. He must be firm with her, very firm, he told himself. He was inclined to spoil her, as he had said, and overlook her faults—but from now, he must show her, too, his displeasure at the disrespectful way she had treated him in the morning. Boxing a husband’s ears!
The red burnt on his brow as he opened [p 40] ]the gate, thinking of it and heard Dot trilling Amiens’ song as she watered some sickly pelargoniums she was trying to grow.
‘I must be firm, very firm,’ Dot had told herself. ‘No husband should order his wife about in the way Larrie ordered me. He is a little, just a little inclined to tyrannise, and I shall be laying up unhappiness for myself if I do not nip it in the earliest bud.’
When she saw his figure coming down the hill, she laid the baby down in the cot inside and bade Peggie give an eye to him. Then she popped on a clean muslin dress with forget-me-nots sprinkled all over it, tied the blue ribbons of her picturesque garden hat in a coquettish bow at the side of her chin, and when Larrie opened the gate she was flitting about the flower beds with an absurdly small red watering can in her hand and the gay little song on her lips. It certainly was provoking.
