“Can’t you call him by his name?” he interrupted. “How ever’ll he come to know it?”
“I don’t want to call him at all,” she protested, a little wildly. “I don’t like him to-night; perhaps to-morrow I will feel different.”
“Well, do or don’t, that dog’s a part of the house, and I don’t want to hear Mrs. Caley say this or that about it, neither.”
“Mrs. Caley isn’t as bad as you make her out; it’s me she’s thinking about most of the time. I tell her men are not like women, they never think about the little things we do. Father was like that ... you are too. That’s all the men I have known.” Her voice trailed off into an abrupt silence, she sat staring into the room with the needlework forgotten in her hand.
Gordon turned to the dog, playing with him, pulling his ears. General Jackson, in remonstrance, softly bit Gordon’s hand. “That’s a dandy dog. Making yourself right at home, hey! Biting right back, are you! Let me feel your teeth, phew—”
“Gordon,” Lettice exclaimed suddenly in a throaty voice, “I’m afraid.... Tell me it will be all right, Gordon.”
He looked up from the dog, startled by the unaccustomed vibration of her tones. “Of course it will be all right,” he reassured her hastily, making an effort to keep his impatience from his voice; “I never guessed you were so easy scared.”
“I’ll try not,” she returned obediently. “Mrs. Caley says it will be all right, too.” She seemed, he thought, even younger than when he had married her. She was absurdly girlish. It annoyed him; it seemed, unjustly, to place too great a demand upon his forbearance, his patience. A wife should be able to give and take—this was almost like having a child to tend. Lately she had been frightened even at the dark, she had wakened him over nothing at all, fancies.
He decided to pay no further attention to her imagining; and moved to the phonograph, where he selected one of a small number of waxy cylinders. “We’ll see how the General likes music,” he proclaimed. He slipped the cylinder over a projection, and wound the mechanism. A sharp, high scratching responded, as painful as a pin dragging over the ear drum, a meaningless cacophony of sounds that gradually resolved into a thin, incredibly metallic melody which appeared, mercifully, to come from a distance. To this was presently joined a voice, the voice, as it were, of a sinister, tin manikin galvanized into convulsive song. The words grew audible in broken phrases:
| ... was a lucky man, Rip van Winkle ... grummmble ... never saw the women At Coney Island swimming ... |