To which Dare had instantly retorted, “Indeed I’m not the water you’re a fish in. I’m the whale you’re a swordfish attacking, and I shall be glad to get back east where there’s nothing I can’t either swallow or out-swim.”
Miriam had been exasperated at not being able to read between the bantering lines. For there must be a situation, she reasoned; two such abounding persons, no matter how adroit, could never have got so far into each others’ minds without having got some distance into each other’s blood.
But the situation, whatever it was, was not divulged, and Miriam was denied whatever solace her own unruly heart might have derived from the knowledge that Keble’s wife’s heart was also unruly.
Whether Louise’s sense of duty had a share in it or not, a “him” was duly produced and ecstatically made at home. Even his mother ended by admitting that he was “not a bad little beast.” She had vetoed Keble’s plan to import a nurse from England, and had trained Katie Salter for the post. As motherhood had once been Katie’s passionate avocation, Louise could think of no better way to translate into deeds the spirit of her outlandish funeral sermon on neighborliness than to promote Katie from the wash-house to the nursery.
Keble and Miriam came in from an hour’s skating one afternoon late in December to find Louise at the tea-table submitting to Katie’s proud account of the prodigy’s gain in weight. She was mildly amused to learn that the tender hair on the back of babies’ heads was worn off by their immoderate addiction to pillows.
Keble leaned over the perambulator, not daring to put his finger into the trap of his son’s microscopic hand lest its coldness have some dire effect. He had an infatuated apprehension of damage to his child, having so recently learned the terrific physical cost of life. His tenderness for the infant had a strange effect on Louise. It made her wish that she were the baby. Tears gathered in her eyes as she watched him, still aglow from his exercise and fairly hanging on Katie’s statistics.
She began to pour tea as Miriam threw aside her furs and drew up a chair. Miriam had hoped, in common with Keble and Katie Salter, that Louise’s indifference would disappear as if by magic when the baby came within range of the census. She was forced to admit, however, that Louise was not appreciably more partial to her son than to Elvira Brown or Dicky Swigger.
“Could you desert him long enough to drink a cup of tea?” Louise inquired after a decent interval. She liked the solemn manner in which Keble talked to the future member of the House of Lords. Like Gladstone addressing the Queen, Keble addressed the baby as though it were a public meeting. “You must make due allowance for the incurable knick-knackery of woman kind,” he was saying, as he smoothed out a lace border in which two tiny fingers had become entangled and against which,—or something equally unjust,—a lusty voice was beginning to protest.
“He’s not as polite as you are, if he does take after you,” Louise commented when Keble had praised the toasted cheese cakes.
Keble judged this a fair criticism, and Miriam was of the opinion that a polite baby would be an unendurable monstrosity. “I like him best of all,” she said, “when he kicks and twists and screams ‘fit to bust his pram’, as Katie says. Although I’m also quite keen about him when he’s dining. Yes, thanks, and another cheese cake . . . And his way of always getting ready to sneeze and then not, that’s endearing. And his dreams about food.”