"I wish you wouldn't, Elick," said his wife reproachfully; "not before the children, anyway."
The children, a girl of seven and a boy of four, sat on the doorstep in a sort of dazed inertia, occasioned by the shock of the household's sudden and somewhat perplexing return to its week-day atmosphere just as they had adjusted themselves to the low Sabbatic temperature engendered by the minister's presence.
The girl had two tightly braided wisps of hair in varying hues of corn-silk, curving together at the ends like the mandibles of a beetle. She turned when her father spoke, and looked from him to her mother with a round, blue-eyed stare from under her bulging forehead. The boy's stolid head was thrown back a little, so that his fat neck showed two sunburned wrinkles below his red curls. His gingham apron parted at the topmost button, disclosing a soft, pathetic little back, and his small trousers were hitched up under his arms, the two bone buttons which supported them staring into the room reproachfully, as if conscious of the ignominy of belonging to masculine garb under the feminine eclipse of an apron.
Mrs. Randall bent a troubled gaze upon her offspring, as if expecting to see them wilt visibly under their father's irreverence.
"Mary Frances," she said anxiously, "run away and show little brother the colts."
The girl got up and took her brother's hand.
"Come on, Wattie," she said in a small, superior way, very much as if she had added: "These grown people have weaknesses which it is better for us to pretend not to know. They are going to talk about them."
Mrs. Randall waited until the two little figures idled across the dooryard before she spoke.
"I don't think you ought to act the way you do, Elick, just because you don't like Mr. Turnbull; it ain't right."
The man dropped his chin doggedly, and fed himself without lifting his elbows from the table.