“I sometimes wish we could all go together,” said Mrs Waldron. “Life is so difficult now and then.”
“You are tired, dear. Things look so differently at different times. For after all, what would not Lady Mildred, poor woman, give for one of our boys—even poor Jerry!”
“Even Jerry!” said Mrs Waldron. “I don’t know one of them I could less afford to part with than him. Arthur is a good boy, a very good boy as an eldest; but Jerry has a sort of instinctive understandingness about him that makes him the greatest possible comfort. Yes, cold and selfish though she may be, I can pity Lady Mildred when I think of her loneliness.”
“And I don’t know that she is cold and selfish,” said Mr Waldrop. “It is more that she has lived in a very narrow world, and it has never occurred to her to look out beyond it. Self-absorption is, after all, not exactly selfishness. But it is getting late, Amy, and Sunday is not much of a day of rest for you, I am sorry to say.”
“I don’t know about that,” she replied, smiling brightly again. “Now that the boys are old enough not to require looking after, and Charlotte is very good with the little ones—no, I don’t think I have any reason to grumble. My hard-working Sundays are becoming things of the past. Sometimes I could almost find it in my heart to regret them! It was very sweet, after all, when they were all tiny mites, with no world outside our own little home, and perfect faith in it and in us—and indeed in everything. I do love very little children.”
“You will be more than half a child yourself, even when you have grey hair and are a grandmother perhaps,” said her husband, laughing.