"Sure, darling," said he, "is it crying you are? What would you be doing that for? If I've lost one job I can get another. I'm not afraid of work, and I know how to do it. I'll get something to do at once, if it's only wheeling a handcart, or selling cockles in public-houses. Wisha, dry your eyes—they're as pretty as they ever were," said he, trying to look at them, while his wife, with a strange shyness, would not let him see, for she felt that there was a strange man with her, some one she did not know. That was a man's hand on her shoulder, and she had never felt a man's hand before, as long as she was married.
"I'll go out at once," said he, "and when I come in to-night I'll have a job if I have to bang it out of some one with a shovel."
He slapped on his hat, kicked the soap out of the way, tramped through the water on the floor, and when at the door he turned again and came back to kiss his wife, a form of caress which had long fallen into desuetude, and so, out into the street, a man again.
When he had gone his wife returned to her scrubbing, and, as she worked she smiled at something she was remembering, and, now and again, a bit of a song came from lips that had scolded so much. Having finished her work she spent nearly an hour at the looking-glass doing up her hair (grand hair it was, too) with her ears listening for a footstep. Now and again she would run to the pot to see were the potatoes doing all right—"The children will be in shortly," said she, "and hungry to the bone, poor dears."
But she was not thinking of the children. The warmth of a kiss was still on her lips. Something in the back of her head was saying—"He will do it again when he comes in."
And the second honeymoon was pleasanter than the first.
III
She was tall and angular. Her hair was red, and scarce, and untidy. Her hands were large and packed all over with knuckles and her feet would have turned inwards at the toes, only that she was aware of and corrected their perversities.
She was sitting all alone, and did not look up as I approached—
"Tell me," said I, "why you have sat for more than an hour with your eyes fixed on nothing, and your hands punching your lap?"