“My dear madam! My husband”—
“Dass you’ uzban’?” pointing at him.
“Yes!” cried the two Richlings at once.
The woman folded her arms again, turned half-aside, and, lifting her eyes to the ceiling, simply remarked, with an ecstatic smile:—
“Humph!” and left the pair, red with exasperation, to find the street again through the darkening cave of the stair-way.
It was still early the next morning, when Richling entered his wife’s apartment with an air of brisk occupation. She was pinning her brooch at the bureau glass.
“Mary,” he exclaimed, “put something on and come see what I’ve found! The queerest, most romantic old thing in the city; the most comfortable—and the cheapest! Here, is this the wardrobe key? To save time I’ll get your bonnet.”
“No, no, no!” cried the laughing wife, confronting him with sparkling eyes, and throwing herself before the wardrobe; “I can’t let you touch my bonnet!”
There is a limit, it seems, even to a wife’s subserviency.