“The Martindales! Why, they only returned this evening—I met them on the boat,” said Rivers.
“Yes, we know that, but one of them will be over here just the same,” said Mrs. Callender placidly. “They’ll want to see what we’re doing. Do somebody pay a little attention to Mrs. Waring; she hasn’t said a word for half an hour. I believe she’s hoping that Henry’ll be too homesick to stay away.”
“Not quite,” said Mrs. Waring with a little tremble of her lower lip.
“Nice, kind little woman you are,” said Porter severely. “Want to enjoy yourself thinking how unhappy Waring is. Well, I’m glad he went, and I hope he’ll stay until he’s well; if any man needed a change, he did.”
“He would have taken me with him if I could have left the children,” murmured Mrs. Waring.
“Yes, the children win every time,” said Porter with easy philosophy. “You think you’re important, my brothers, until you’re confronted with your own offspring, and then you’re not in it.”
“I don’t see,” said Mr. Nichols, filling his pipe again, “why a man’s family should stay in town and broil because he has to. It wouldn’t be any satisfaction to me, I know that. My little girls write to me every day.”
“I remember,” said Rivers, leaning forward, “once when Bess and I took a trip together we had to come home just when the fishing was at its height, because she imagined what it would be like if a menagerie broke loose and a tiger got at little Brook when he was asleep in his crib. She said she knew it was perfectly absurd, but she couldn’t stand it a moment longer. So we came home.”
He laughed tenderly at the reminiscence, and the other men laughed with him, but the women, even Mrs. Callender, who had no children, were serious, and Mrs. Weir said, as if speaking for the rest,
“Yes, one does feel that way sometimes.”