The tears came suddenly now; all the controlled terrors, the pent-up agony, the puzzled situation, the fearful prospects, rushed to the top of the child’s mind: it was like the over-filling of a cup. He flung himself face downwards on the sofa, dragging the tablecloth after him and covering the carpet with defeated soldiers. Edith knelt beside him trying to soothe and comfort him, but his little clenched hands pushed her away. The general with his cocked hat and the best gun lay on her lap, and bitter tears fell on them--bitter, unavailing tears; and so Horace found them shortly after six.
He carried his sobbing little boy away, and Edith sat and wept over the soldiers alone and uncomforted.
“I wonder how she can have managed to upset him so,” said Etta; “but I thought this afternoon that she hardly looked as if she could manage a delicate highly-strung child. She has sent him into a really dangerous fit of crying.”
As for Horace, he went to his study and smoked a strong cigar. He was puzzled and disappointed. Edith had been so certain she could win the little chap over, and the boy hadn’t cried while he was there. Edith must have done something stupid; she had been upset enough herself, poor girl; but he did not go back and comfort her--she must have done something stupid.
VI
“It all depends upon what you mean by a successful marriage,” Lady Walton had remarked earlier in the day. “You have now, my dear Edith, been married ten years; you look ten years younger than you are; your husband spends all his evenings at home, and you have an excellent staff of servants. I really do not see what more you can ask!”
“I don’t suppose we often see why other people should ask more than they have,” Edith replied. “Other people ought to be satisfied, and yet other people aren’t.”
“I don’t wish to talk metaphysics,” said Lady Walton; “it reminds me of the time when I fell downstairs on the back of my head and had concussion of the brain. I suppose you mean you haven’t any children? Neither had I, and I have never regretted it.”
Lady Walton was one of those people who always thought that what she did not object to was not objectionable; she felt this very strongly.
“My own faults, which I can excuse quite easily and always see reasons for,” she went on after a pause, “would annoy me excessively in a younger generation--even my virtues would seem weak and tame imitation in some pudding-faced young girl. I should have known better what to do with a boy who would have been certain to die if he had been satisfactory, and equally certain to live if he was not. No, my dear Edith, let us be thankful we have both been spared a tiresome and difficult vocation. An unhappy marriage is often made bearable by such additions, but a really happy marriage can dispense with them.”