"Yes, dear,—such a thing might be very convenient, if it were once established,—though I fear it would lack the personal touch. But for the time being, since there isn't any communal incubator, your duty is to sit on your eggs."
"My duty! How about my duty to myself? Don't you suppose that my nature demands any higher fulfillment than this?" Rustling her feathers petulantly, she got up.
"Stop!" he cried. "You shall not desert our eggs! I have acceded to your other modernisms—your coop-reform theories, your sex-education for ducklings; I have even come out openly for the single standard of morality;—but this thing I will not tolerate."
"You'd like me to be an insipid nestwarmer like Martha, wouldn't you? Well, I won't, now. I intend to know life!" And, with a defiant waggle of her tail, she departed, to undertake research in distant puddles.
Eustace felt stunned. He was so dazed that he allowed a luscious black beetle, that crawled past within easy range, to proceed on its way ungobbled. Poor, forlorn eggs, he thought, children of an unnatural mother, they were too young to realize that they had been forsaken!
Pity overcame his pride: he sidled over and sat on them. They felt rather cosy and comforting, pressing thus snugly against his paternal breast. He spread out his feathers lovingly.
He would sit here for a while, he thought, as he craned his neck this way and that to be sure that no one was looking,—yes, he would sit here till Gertrude returned, and then he would do what he could to make things up again. After all, there was a good deal in what she had said. She had had a hard time, sitting still for so many days, and he ought to be willing to....
"Er-ur-er-ur-errr!" crowed an insolent voice, startlingly near by.
Clarence! Eustace hopped off the eggs as though they were live coals. Hastily snapping up something from the ground, he began gulping it assiduously, with much show of hunger. But his success was not great, for it was a rubber washer and proved to be more pliable than swallowable.
Clarence came swaggering up with, "Hello, Eustace, old game bird! Say, did you see a good-looking blonde pullet go past here?"