“So that—so that everybody can always have enough to eat.”
“Everybody?”
“Me, too?”
“Yes, my darling; you, of course.”
Locked in each other’s arms they looked down sidelong at the little euphemism. The small voice said:
“Now that he’s there, they’re safe, aren’t they?”
“Quite safe.”
He had given up attending to his business, but almost every morning, at nearly the same hour, he would walk down to his club, not looking very much at things about the streets, partly because his thoughts were otherwise engaged, partly because he had found it from the first a deleterious habit, tending to the overcultivation of the social instincts. Arriving, he would take the Times and the Financial News, and go to his pet armchair; here he would stay till lunch-time, reading all that bore in any way on his affairs, and taking a grave view of every situation. But at lunch a longing to express himself would come, and he would tell his neighbours tales of his little grandsons, of the extraordinary things they did, and of the future he was laying up for them. In the pleasant warmth of mid-day, over his light but satisfying lunch, surrounded by familiar faces, he would recount these tales in cheerful tones, and his old grey eyes would twinkle; between him and his struggle with those nightly apparitions, there were many hours of daylight, there was his visit to the nursery. But, suddenly, looking up fixedly with strained eyes, he would put a question such as this: “Do you ever wake up in the night?” If the answer were affirmative, he would say: “Do you ever find things worry you then out of—out of all proportion?” And, if they did, he would clearly be relieved to hear it. On one occasion, when he had elicited an emphatic statement of the discomfort of such waking hours, he blurted out: “You don’t ever see a lot of great owls sitting on your bed, I suppose?” Then, seemingly ashamed of what he had just asked, he rose, and left his lunch unfinished.
His fellow-members, though nearly all much younger than himself, had no unkindly feeling for him. He seemed to them, perhaps, to overrate their interest in his grandsons and the state of his investments; but they knew he could not help preoccupation with these subjects; and when he left them, usually at three o’clock, saying almost tremulously: “I must be off; my grandsons will be looking out for me!” they would exchange looks as though remarking: “The old chap thinks of nothing but his grandchildren.” And they would sit down to “bridge,” taking care to play within the means their fathers had endowed them with.