"Muriel," said Stainton, "I think of nothing else."
"No, you don't think of me," she insisted. "You think only of—of it. You're worried about me as a mother and not as a wife. You are!"
Stainton protested, grieved to the heart; but she would not hear him.
"It's as if you were a stock-farmer," she said, the tears in her velvety eyes, "and I were only your favorite thoroughbred in foal."
This simile he found revolting. It required all his masculine philosophy satisfactorily to account for her use of it, and, even when that had been applied, he reprimanded her, with kindness, but with decisiveness also. It was some time before she begged his pardon and condemned herself; some time before he soothed her and told her, what she hated to hear, that her words had risen not from herself but from her condition.
They went to Marguery's, when the doctor returned to Paris, rather worn out by their week of sightseeing; but they found the crowded restaurant pleasantly diverting. The chatter of the diners, the scurrying of the waiters, and the gratification of the leather-covered seat from which, across a shining table, they faced Boussingault, quieted them and made them forget for a space the subject that one of them was weary of remembering.
Then, by some mischance, Stainton hit upon a fatal topic.
"Doctor," he said, "I am sure you can give me some authoritative information on a matter that I have read a little of. I mean the question of the decrease in the French birth-rate and the efforts to stop it and build up not only a larger race but a race of the best stock."
He saw instantly that he had struck the little man's hobby. Dr. Boussingault sat with one thick knee covered by his serviette and thrust into the aisle for the garçons to stumble over. His dark eyes, keen and expressive, were shaped like wide almonds and, unobscured by any vestige of lashes, perpetually snapped and twinkled through his glasses in a lively disregard of the phlegmatic indications given by the dark bags beneath them.
"The most healthy sign in France to-day," he said. "Absolutely."