“Oh, yes, they had two little ones. Seven in all. I think it odd they should have left the toys here even if they are rich enough to buy toys every day. There is something sacred about a child’s toys.”
Ida was merely talking against time, but she hardly could have said anything better calculated to arrest his attention.
He turned and looked at her in astonishment.
“Do you mean to intimate—that you wish you had children? You?”
Ida’s brain as well as her body was very weary, but it sprang to action at once. “Oh, yes,” she said intensely. “Oh, yes! And I might have had two! They would be wonderful in this house.”
“But——” He cast about desperately. “With two children you could not have gone to Europe.”
“That wouldn’t have mattered.”
“But—don’t you realise that it is this last year of unusual advantages that has developed you so—so—remarkably? You hated children——”
“And do you suppose it was Europe that made me want children?”
“Oh, of course, nothing is as simple as that. You were taken out of yourself, out of your narrow self-sufficient little life; all your fine latent powers were developed——”