"Yes, I'd like to drive every day—you manage them so well."
"Then we will! I'll try to get away for an hour each day, if you'll come, Mary.... But you always have some tiresome thing to keep you at home."
"Do you call the children tiresome things?" she asked, smiling.
"Well—I do, sometimes," he confessed. "They take so much of you.... I'd like to drive you away somewhere, now, away from all of it, for a while. I wish we could run away together. I hardly ever see you, Mary!"
"You see me every day, except when you're away—I should think you must be tired seeing me."
"I never see you alone, except at night and then you're always tired.... I want things arranged so you won't have so much to do, so that we can have an evening together sometimes—go out somewhere or be alone together, without your having to go and sit with some baby or other," said Laurence with sudden peevishness.
"Well, you know, bringing up a family isn't all pleasure," Mary reminded him with mild reproof.
"I should say it wasn't!... But there might be a little. You might think about me, once in a while, and put on a pretty dress and sing to me, the way you used to. You'll be getting old if you keep on this way!"
"With three children you can't expect me to look like a girl," Mary protested.
One of the trotters shied at a paper blown across the road, both horses reared and the light buggy rocked dangerously. Laurence lashed them, stinging blows, then checked their leap with a wrench, pulling them back on their haunches.