"Poor little thing," he said. "Is its head hot? And is it tired?"
"Ranny," she said, "is your mother still upstairs?"
"She'll be gone in a minute," he whispered, thickly.
CHAPTER XIV
Violet's connection with Starker's ceased on the day of her marriage. Violet herself would have continued it; she had meant to continue it; she had fought the point passionately with Ranny; but Ranny had put his foot down with a firmness that subdued her. She had said, "Oh, well—just as you like. If you think you can get along without my pound a week." And Ranny, with considerable warmth, had answered back that he hoped to Heaven he could. And then, again and again, with infinite patience and gentleness, he explained that the privileges of acquiring Granville entailed duties and responsibilities incompatible with her attendance in Starker's Millinery Saloons. He pointed out that if they were dependent upon Granville, Granville was also dependent upon them. Granville, she could see for herself, was helpless—pathetic he was.
And Violet would laugh. In those first days he could always make her laugh by playing with the personality they had created. She would come out into the roadway on an August morning, as Ranny was going off to Woolridge's, and they would look at the absurd little house where it stood winking and blinking in the sun; and morning after morning Ranny kept it up.
"Look at him," he would say, "sittin' there behind his little railin's, sayin' nothing, just waitin' for you to look after him."
And Violet would own that Granville was pathetic. But she triumphed. "You wouldn't feel about him that way," she said, "if he was only Number Forty-seven."
Just at first there was no doubt that Violet was fond of Granville. Just at first it was as if she couldn't do too much for him, to keep him spick and span, clean from top to toe, and always with a happy polish. Just at first he was, as Ranny said, "such a pretty little chap with his funny purple pillar, and his little peepers winkin' at you kind of playful, half the time." For the sun shone on him all that August honeymoon. It streamed down the Avenue between the rows of young acacias whose green tufts with that light on them put Ranny more and more in mind of palm trees. He was more and more in love with the brand-new Paradise. He expressed all the charm of Southfields, of Acacia Avenue, when he said it was "so open, and so up-to-date." It made Wandsworth High Street look old and tortuous and grimy by comparison.