“I’m not sure about that. You must tell Susan to watch for the bell.”
Susan was the old nurse.
Ethel put on her hooded cloak, and we went out together. I took her across to the field where I had seen the hoary shadow. The sun had not shone out, and I hoped it would be there to gladden her dear eyes as it had gladdened mine; but it was gone. The warmth of the sun, without his direct rays, had melted it away, as sacred influences will sometimes do with other shadows, without the mind knowing any more than the grass how the shadow departed. There, reader! I have got a bit of a moral in about it before you knew what I was doing. But I was sorry my wife could see it only through my eyes and words. Then I told her about Miss Bowdler, and what she had said. Ethel was very angry at her impertinence in speaking so to me. That was a wife’s feeling, you know, and perhaps excusable in the first impression of the thing.
“She seems to think,” she said, “that she was sent into the world to keep other people right instead of herself. I am very glad you set her down, as the maids say.”
“O, I don’t think there’s much harm in her,” I returned, which was easy generosity, seeing my wife was taking my part. “Indeed, I am not sure that we are not both considerably indebted to her; for it was after I met her that a thought came into my head as to how we ought to do with Theodora.”
“Still troubling yourself about that, husband?”
“The longer the difficulty lasts, the more necessary is it that it should be met,” I answered. “Our measures must begin sometime, and when, who can tell? We ought to have them in our heads, or they will never begin at all.”
“Well, I confess they are rather of a general nature at present—belonging to humanity rather than the individual, as you would say—consisting chiefly in washing, dressing, feeding, and apostrophe, varied with lullabying. But our hearts are a better place for our measures than our heads, aren’t they?”
“Certainly; I walk corrected. Only there’s no fear about your heart. I’m not quite so sure about your head.”
“Thank you, husband. But with you for a head it doesn’t matter, does it?”