"What are you doing there, Winky?" he would say, when he caught her on a Sunday morning in the bathroom, with Baby happy on a blanket at her feet.
"Washing Dossie's pinafores," she would sing out.
"I wish to Goodness I could stop you."
"But you can't. Can he, Lamby Lamb? Laugh at him, then. Laugh at Daddy."
And the Lamby Lamb would laugh.
He knew, and they knew, that he couldn't stop her except by doing the work for her; and the more things he did the more things she found to do that he couldn't do, such as washing pinafores. So he gave it up; and gradually he too began to take it for granted that Winny should be there.
And she was more than ever there after April of nineteen-seven, when the little son was born. The little son that they called Stanley Fulleymore.
When he came more and more of Ranny's savings had to go. He didn't care. For he had gone again through deep anguish, again believing that Violet would die, that she couldn't possibly get over it. And she had got over it; beautifully, the doctor said. He assured him that she hadn't turned a hair. And after it she bloomed as she had never bloomed before; she bloomed to excess; she coarsened in sheer exuberance and rioting of health. She was built magnificently, built as they don't seem able to build women now, built for maternity.
"You don't think," said Ranny to the doctor, "that it really does her any harm?"
For she had tried to frighten him with the harm she said it did her.