She considered for a moment or two, but she gave no answering touch.
“You’re dead cold,” he withdrew and chirped gaily. “No blood in you. You couldn’t descensus for a cent. What you need is a series of stiff lessons.”
“Isn’t this just jim-dandy,” she murmured, ignoring his talk. “Golly! It’s good sometimes to be just alive.” He grew quiet. “I heard all you said, Neddie. I’m not inattentive. Go on and talk. I like to hear you prattle. But I’m so comforty. I don’t want to think.... And it’s so nice to be taken care of, tucked in, and all that.” She kicked out a foot. “There! It’s out again. Be a good boy and fix the mummy’s legs.”
“And he fixed them up so care-ful-ee,” he sang as he worked, “That now he’s the ruler of the Queen’s nav-ee.”
He smoked and they both lapsed into silence, while his eyes watched her with frank approval.
“Women like to be helpless,” she spoke out the summing up of her thinking. “I always thought I despised those frail beseeching-looking things that hang around like dolls and let men fetch and carry for them. I always did for myself—usually could do it better than any man; but lately, I’ve got a case of the ‘delicates.’ You’re responsible, Neddie; you’ve been taking such delicious care of me that I have succumbed. ‘Let her go, Gallagher and boomp! I’m at the bottom.’ Just tuck in that flapping hair, won’t you? I don’t want to move.”
A dutiful and faithful squire Morris became; and no one thought anything of it. Mrs. Levering frequently came to the “smitty” to watch the work or to chat with Gorgas about little teas and small receptions that kept an informal atmosphere moving in the neighborhood; Gorgas was clever in thinking up original things, decorations and so on. Ned’s presence was accepted as a matter of course. Had he not grown up in the neighborhood, and were not he and Gorgas perpetual tennis partners? But it is doubtful if she ever asked herself even so much as that; her serene assumption of the careful mother had annihilated all thinking on the subject.
“My daughters,” she confessed to a caller who was interested in seeing the “smitty,” “are pretty much about what I planned. It is almost wholly a question of management, I think. For instance, I decided that Keyser should like music. She rebelled, naturally; but I held her to it—my will was the stronger. Now she plays rather nicely, I think; and she’s very grateful, I can tell, for my insistence. Gorgas has been a trial, I must say; but look how she has come around! There was a time when we could hardly have a decent conversation together,” she laughed, “but now we’re quite chums.
“And then there’s that awful question of boys. I have never had the question. For us it just doesn’t exist. My scheme is very simple. I keep a lot of social things going on right at home; the girls have a good time, and I know everything that is happening.”
While Mrs. Levering talked, Ned Morris was saying pretty nothings in Gorgas’ ear.