I can not say that I love Wuzzy as much as I do Constance. He is the heir of the Fergusons and the conquering male is already apparent. It is plain to be seen that he thinks women were made to administer to his comfort and amuse him in his dull moments. I have memories of taking care of Wuzzy last autumn at Betty’s country place when his nurse was off duty. I never worked so hard in my life. Half the energy and imagination expended in what the newspapers call a “gainful occupation” would have made me one of those women of whom The Ladies’ Home Journal prints biographies.
I carried him down-stairs. It was not necessary, for dangling from the maternal hand he could have been dragged along, but there is something so nice about hugging a healthy, warm, little bundle of a boy. As I bent for him he held up his arms with a bored expression, then stiff and upright against my shoulder, looked down the staircase and yawned. It’s the utter confidence of a child that makes it so charming. Wuzzy relinquished himself to my care as if, when it came to carrying a baby down-stairs, I was the expert of the western world.
As we descended I rubbed my cheek against his, satin-smooth, cold and firm. He drew back and gazed at me, a curiously deep look, impersonal, profound. The human being soon loses the capacity for that look. It only belongs to the state when we are still “trailing clouds of glory.”
We squeezed him between us and tooled away toward Fifth Avenue. It was a glorious afternoon and it was glorious to be out again, to breathe the keen sharp air, to see the park trees in a thin purplish mist of branch on branch. Wuzzy, seeing little boys and girls on roller skates, suddenly pounded on us with his heels and had to be lifted to a prominent position on our knees, whence he leaned over the door and beat gently on the air with his kid mitts.
“What a bother this child is,” sighed Betty, boosting him up, “I only brought him because I had to. Some relation of his nurse is sick and she went out to see them.”
Her only son is the object of Mrs. Ferguson’s passionate adoration, yet she always speaks of him as if he was her greatest cross.
Wuzzy comfortable, his attention concentrated on the moving show, I brought my subject on the carpet.
“Dear me, how dreadful,” Betty murmured, much moved by the expurgated version of Lizzie Harris’ troubles. “Wuzzy, if you don’t stop kicking me with your heels I’ll take you home.”
Wuzzy stopped kicking, throwing himself far over the door to follow the flight of a golden-locked fairy in brown velvet. We held him by his rear draperies and talked across his back.
“It’s a cruel situation,” I answered. “Everything has failed the poor creature.”