"I must go at once," he bethought himself, as he refused a second cup. "I—er—shall be late to my dinner." But he lingered gloomily while she cheered the afflicted Carroll with warm milk well sweetened with sugar.
"You'll find some—some feathers in a box in the hall," he informed her, when he finally took his leave. "I wanted to tell you that I—er—regretted exceedingly that I had injured yours with my umbrella on the day we were to have lunched together and—didn't."
Miss Tripp took the cerise plumes out of their wrappings and examined them in the blissful security of her own room—this after the Brewster children had gone home and the Stanford children were at last in bed and safely asleep.
"How-extraordinary!" she murmured, her cheeks reflecting palely the vivid tints of the latest importation from Paris.
XVII
Having definitely abandoned the unthinking, hit-or-miss method of child discipline practised by the generality of parents, Elizabeth Brewster and her husband found themselves facing a variety of problems. To be exact, there were three of them; Carroll, with his somewhat timid and yielding, yet too self-conscious nature; Doris, hot-tempered, generous and loving, and baby Richard, who already exhibited an adamantine firmness of purpose, which a careless observer might have termed stubbornness. There was another questionable issue which these wide-awake young parents were obliged to face, and that was the entirely unconfessed partiality which Elizabeth cherished for her first-born son and the equally patent yet unacknowledged "particular affection" Sam felt for his one small daughter. More than once in the past the two had found themselves at the point of serious disagreement when the boy and girl had come into collision; Sam hotly—too hotly—upholding the cause of Doris, while Elizabeth was almost tearfully sure that her son had not been in fault. Neither had taken the pains to trace these quite human and natural predilections to their source; but they were agreed in thinking the outcome unsafe. They determined, therefore, to defer to the other's judgment in those instances when special discipline appeared to be demanded by either child.
All this by way of prelude to a certain stormy evening in March when Sam Brewster, returning more tired than usual from a long day of hard work in his office, found his Elizabeth with reddened eyelids and a general appearance of carefully subdued emotion.
"Well! I say," he began, as he divested himself of his wet coat and kicked off his overshoes with an air bordering on impatience; "it's beastly weather outside; hope none of it's got inside. Where are the kiddies? And what is the matter with the lady of the house?"