"Have a game, ma?" asked Dutch Frank.
"No, thank you. I've come to beg, borrow or steal. Can someone lend or give me a few cigarettes? My poor man has run short. It's too hot to go out. At least, I'm going to stay in."
They all had any amount of cigarettes; the piles of ends in the hearth made her think contemptuously of Louis scrabbling in the dust for them. Next minute she was sorry for her unkindness. The boys each pressed a packet of ten upon her; when she tried to choose between them they insisted that they would be jealous unless she took them all. Louis's face, when he saw forty cigarettes in her hand, disgusted her. It was like the pigs in the sty at feeding time—squealing—jostling.
In his relief, he became quite charming. He began to joke, and "be good" just like a child who had worried all day for a treat and been granted it by a weak mother who had reached the limit of endurance. He joked and told her stories and was more pleasant than she had ever seen him.
"You are a darling, you know, and you do spoil me, girlie," he said, kissing her hand. "You forgive me for being a baby, don't you?"
She could not say she didn't, as she smoothed the damp hair from his forehead.
In her mood caused by his brightening spirits she felt she could not go on reading "L'Assommoir." She glanced at the Sunday papers and put them down. Louis looked at her and laughed.
"Now you've got the fidgets," he said. "Let's do something."
"I've nothing to read but that Zola thing, and a book on Symbolism that Dr. Angus sent. And I don't want to read a bit. Louis, we'll have to do something, you and I. We're rusting. We'll have to get away."
"In this heat?"