Peter's attention came back from the window with a start. "Does that mean the Fresh Air Fund or the Association for the Protection of Ownerless Pups?"
Julian grinned. "Ownerless bachelors rather. Clarice has an idea you are well enough off to marry."
"If it were a proposition of my being married to Clarice I should consider myself well enough off without anything else——" Peter dropped the light, accustomed banter for a sober tone. "How well off does your wife think I ought to be?"
"She's got it figured out that all you've spent on making Ellen comfortable for life isn't a patch on what she and the boys cost me, so it's high time you set about your natural destiny of making some woman happy."
"Look here, Julian, is it an object for a man to live for, making some woman happy?"
"Well, it keeps you on the jump all right," Lessing assured him. "What else is there? It's a way of making yourself happy when you come to look at it; keeping her and the kids so that you leave the world better off than you found it. It suits me." He was looking, indeed, particularly well suited, in spite of a disposition to portliness and a suspicion of thinning hair, with what the seventeen years just past had brought him. A warm appreciation of what those things were touched his regard for his companion with a sober affectionateness. "I reckon Clarice is right: a wife and a couple of kids is the prescription for your case. That's why she wanted me to remind you that you could afford 'em."
"And has she named the day?" Peter wished to know whimsically.
"Oh, I say, Weatheral——"
"My dear Julian, if I hadn't been able to see what Clarice has been up to for the last six months, at least I could have depended on Ellen to see it for me."
"She doesn't object, does she?"