“I knew it,” I said; and I thought what a triumph it would be for me over Harry, for I must confess I do like to prove him wrong now and then. Men—even the best of them—will persist in thinking women don’t know much about anything except how to boil potatoes, how to make beds, and how to nurse babies, and I have known a husband who even wanted to show his wife how to do that till she lost her temper, and said, “Oh, as you know such a lot about it, perhaps you’ll tell me whose babies you’ve been in the habit of nursing!”
Harry—though I don’t want to say a word against him as a husband and a father, for a better never breathed, God bless him!—has little faults of his own, and good-tempered as I am and hope I always shall be, yet once or twice he has nearly put me out, and made me speak a little sharp, and it’s generally been about baby. A nicer, plumper, healthier baby there doesn’t exist, but Harry is that foolish over him, you’d think he (the baby, not Harry) was made of glass and would break. Of course I’m very fond of showing him to my female friends who come to see me, and sometimes I just undress him a little to show them what lovely little limbs he has. If Harry comes in, he begins to fidget at that directly. “You’ll give that child his death of cold,” he says; “the idea of taking him out of his warm bed and stripping him.”
Of course that makes me indignant. No mother likes to be told how to nurse her own child before other mothers.
Once when he came in like that I didn’t take any notice, but I just undressed baby a little more. It was a very warm room, and there was a bright fire, so it didn’t hurt, and I thought I would just show the other ladies that I didn’t give the management of the nursery over to Harry.
What made me do it, perhaps, more than anything was, that Mrs. Goose—a dreadful mischief-making old woman, that I must tell you about by-and-by—was in the room, and she curled her lip in a very irritating way, and said—
“Well, I never! What do sailors know about babies? I should like to have seen my husband interfering between me and my infant when I was young!”
“Ah,” said Harry, “things were different in olden times, I dare say.”
“Olden times!” says she. “My youngest is only eighteen come next Michaelmas, Mr. Beckett; but, of course, a man who would teach his wife how to manage her infant——”
“Oh, please don’t take any notice, Mrs. Goose,” I said; “it’s only one of my husband’s funny ways.” And I took baby’s nightgown right off, and let him kick his dear little legs up, and crow on my lap, with only his little flannel on.
“Funny ways or not, my dear,” said Harry, “that baby belongs to me as much as it does to you, and I’m not going to have its constitution ruined just to amuse a lot of old women.”