‘You look fearfully ugly when you screw up your mouth like that,’ she said, looking up at his set side face.
‘You’re an unnatural mother, Dot, that’s what you are,’ he returned hotly. ‘By Jove, if I was a woman, I’d be ashamed to act as you do. You get worse every day you live. I’ve kept excusing you to myself, and saying you would get wiser as you grew older, and instead, you seem more childish every day.’
She looked childish. She was very, very small in stature, very slightly and delicately built. Her hair was in soft gold-brown curls, as short as a boy’s; her eyes were soft, and wide, and tender, and beautiful as a child’s. When she was happy they were the colour of that blue, deep violet we call the Czar, and when she grew thoughtful, or sorrowful, they were like the heart of a great, dark purple pansy. She was not particularly beautiful, [p 6] ]only very fresh, and sweet, and lovable. Larrie once said she always looked like a baby that has been freshly bathed and dressed, and puffed with sweet violet powder, and sent out into the world to refresh tired eyes.
That was one of his courtship sayings, more than a year ago when she was barely seventeen. She was eighteen now, and he was telling her she was an unnatural mother.
‘Why, the child wouldn’t have had its bib on, only I saw to it,’ he said, in a voice that increased in excitement as he dwelt on the enormity.
‘Dear me,’ said Dot, ‘that was very careless of Peggie, I must really speak to her about it.’
‘I shall shake you some day, Dot,’ Larrie said, ‘shake you till your teeth rattle. Sometimes I can hardly keep my hands off you.’
His brow was gloomy, his boyish face troubled, vexed.
And Dot laughed. Leaned against the fence skirting the road that seemed to run to eternity, and laughed outrageously.
[p 7]
]Larrie stopped too. His face was very white and square-looking, his dark eyes held fire. He put his hands on the white, exaggerated shoulders of her muslin dress and turned her round.