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The cat asleep in baby’s cradle! Oh, Harry! and I only left you with him for half an hour while I did my writing. Don’t laugh! please don’t laugh! I’ve heard the most terrible things about cats in babies’ cradles. I declare I can’t trust you with baby for a second. Thought they looked so pretty together, did you? A nice thing if I’d found my dear baby with its breath sucked by the cat, and its father looking on laughing!
CHAPTER III.
MISS WARD’S YOUNG MAN.
I told you that when we took over the ‘Stretford Arms’ we kept most of the people about the place, and among them the barmaid, Miss Ward—Clara we generally called her. She was a great help to us, knowing the ways of the place and the customers; for you may be sure everything was very strange to us at first.
If I were to tell you that once or twice I really felt inclined to sit down and cry, you would laugh at me; but it was true. I said to Harry, when we went to bed the first night, quite worn out, “Harry, we shall be ruined! We’ve gone into a business we know nothing about, and we shall lose all our money.”
Harry laughed, and said I was a goose, and he was soon fast asleep. But I lay awake for ever so long, imagining all manner of dreadful things; even seeing ourselves seized for rent, the customers having all gone away through my knowing nothing about the business. And when I wasn’t thinking of that, I was seeing a great big navvy come into the bar and begin to swear, and throw quart pots at the plate glass, and Harry jumping over the bar and having a fight with him, and both of them rolling over on the floor, and knocking their heads against the spittoons.
If once I begin to think instead of going to sleep, I think dreadful things, and they seem quite real at the time. I wonder why it is that everything in your life seems going wrong sometimes when you lie awake at night, and when you’ve been to sleep and wake up in the morning everything seems to have come right again?
I know that the first night at our new home, when I didn’t sleep, beside the things I’ve told you, I imagined people coming and taking our rooms, and staying for a week and not paying their bills, and I couldn’t get out of my head a story I had once heard about a gentleman who stayed a month at an hotel, and lived on the fat of the land, borrowed ten pounds, and went away leaving a very heavy box, and when the box was opened it was full of nothing but bricks.
And I was dreadfully frightened about the licensing laws. I didn’t know much about them, but I had read cases in the papers about landlords being summoned, and the first night, when it was closing time, and the customers in our bar and smoking-room were slow in going, and Harry had to say, “Now, gentlemen, please!” twice, and still they stopped talking, and one old gentleman didn’t seem as if he’d ever get into his overcoat, being a little paralyzed on one side, I felt inclined to drop down on my knees and say, “Oh, do go; please go! Fancy if the policeman comes and Harry’s summoned!”
Of course I soon got over this sort of thing, and now they tell me I make a very good landlady indeed; but at first everything made me dreadfully nervous, and I made a few mistakes.