“Well, I forgot all about you,” William excused himself, “An’ anyway I’d a lot of work to do at the office——”
“An’ I kept waiting an’ waiting and thinking you’d come back every minute and you didn’t!”
“Well, how could I?” said William. “How could I come back every minute? How could anyone come back every minute? And anyway,” as he saw Violet Elizabeth working up her all-powerful tears, “it’s lunch time and I’m going home.”
******
William’s mother was out to lunch and Ethel was her most objectionable and objecting. She objected to William’s hair and to William’s hands and to William’s face.
“Well, I’ve washed ’em and I’ve brushed it,” said William firmly. “I don’ see what you can do more with faces an’ hair than wash’ em an’ brush it. ’F you don’ like the colour they wash an’ brush to I can’t help that. It’s the colour they was born with. It’s their nat’ral colour. I can’t do more than wash ’em an’ brush it.”
“Yes, you can,” said Ethel unfeelingly. “You can go and wash them and brush it again.”
Under the stern eye of his father who had lowered his paper for the express purpose of displaying his stern eye William had no alternative but to obey.
“Some people,” he remarked bitterly to the stair carpet as he went upstairs, “don’ care how often they make other people go up an’ downstairs, tirin’ themselves out. I shun’t be surprised ’f I die a good lot sooner than I would have done with all this walkin’ up an’ downstairs tirin’ myself out—an’ all because my face an’ hands an’ hair’s nat’rally a colour she doesn’t like!”
Ethel was one of William’s permanent grievances against Life.