His last argument was convincing. “I won't do anything you don't want me to do, dear,” she said, with a new humility.
“I want you to be happy, dearest,” he answered, quickly. “Just try my way for a year—that's all I ask. I know your independence is sweet to you, but the privilege of working for you with hand and brain, with your love in my heart; with you at home, to be proud of me when I succeed and to give me new courage when I fail, why, it's the sweetest thing I've ever known.”
“I'll have to go back to town very soon, though,” she said, a little later, “I am interrupting the honeymoon.”
“We'll have one of our own very soon that you can't interrupt, and, when you go back, I'm going with you. We'll buy things for the house.”
“We need lots of things, don't we?” she asked.
“I expect we do, darling, but I haven't the least idea what they are. You'll have to tell me.”
“Oriental rugs, for one thing,” she said, “and a mahogany piano, and an instrument to play it with, because I haven't any parlour tricks, and some good pictures, and a waffle iron and a porcelain rolling pin.”
“What do you know about rolling pins and waffle irons?” he asked fondly.
“My dear boy,” she replied, patronisingly, “you forget that in the days when I was a free and independent woman, I was on a newspaper. I know lots of things that are utterly strange to you, because, in all probability, you never ran a woman's department. If you want soup, you must boil meat slowly, and if you want meat, you must boil it rapidly, and if dough sticks to a broom straw when you jab it into a cake, it isn't done.”
He laughed joyously. “How about the porcelain rolling pin?”