I felt that I could hardly stand the Old Daguerreotype just at this time, but said to Julian it was kind of him, taken in such a precise attitude as he was, to dust himself walking out from the Avenue, on our account.
“Oh, it isn’t the first time he has done it,” said Julian. “Something about our rural domicile has seized upon Uncle Doctor. He didn’t go out of town this year, and he’s taking whiffs of the country between sermons.”
“Between poses,” I suggested softly. “I hope Jennie isn’t bothered by his coming. She takes strong antipathies, and he does make one’s backbone ache.”
“Oh, she stands it,” said Julian laughing, “affably, as if she were the artist who had taken him.”
I turned around towards Jennie as Julian went to the gate to meet his uncle. She was bringing T’férgore across the porch and smoothing down the angel robes. She herself looked like a Madonna picture, pale and somewhat saddened, but most womanly, most touching.
“Jennie,” I said, as she put T’férgore on my lap, standing before me to do so, “you have taken care of me as only a woman can, and pulled me through to paradise.”
“Well,” she replied quickly, “you took care of me first. I think I must have been out of my senses. But having this little monster to handle made things appear very different.”
T’férgore blinked lazily, and struck out with ineffectual fists. The cherub-wings were perhaps hidden in folds of mull, but gazing on this wonderful creature’s allurements, I was seized with a Saturn-like desire to bite and devour every flower-tinted atom. I forgot that the Old Daguerreotype was at the gate, and worried my prey, breaking into a rhapsody of baby Romany.
In the midst of my Bess’ums and S’eetums, and Old Dol’ums, Uncle Doctor appeared before me, and bent himself at T’férgore’s shrine, with an expression nearly as idiotic as my own. He clucked, whistled, and snapped his fingers, and for one moment I thought he was going to dance. But his legs were taken too stiffly for that, and he only limbered his entire length and cracked the glass in a way which damaged him forever as my Old Daguerreotype.
Then he straightened himself up apologetically and shook hands with Jennie, saying in his most ministerial tones, “And how are you to-day, Dr. Jane?”