“She’s beyond me. I don’t understand her; and, on the whole, I don’t like her.”
“Nobody likes her; she’s queer. And plain; my word, why do you suppose I had to have a child that looks like that? She hasn’t one good point.”
“Um—she’s got eyes.”
“Great big goopy eyes too big for her head! This parent business is too much of a gamble. If you could go pick out a nice blue-eyed, pink-and-white, ready-made infant——”
“I suppose you should have picked out a pink-and-white ready-made husband, if you wanted that kind,” Wally interposed.
“Well, I never would have picked out Isabelle.”
“After all, you’re her mother, Max,” he began.
“Look here, Wally, don’t begin on that mother stuff. I didn’t want her any more than you did, and we were fools to have her. That may be abnormal, unnatural, and all the rest of it, but it’s the truth, and there are lots of other women just like me. You can’t lump us, any more than you can lump men. We don’t all of us have the maternal instinct, not by a long shot.”
“Don’t talk like that, Max; it’s not nice.”