“Why, I’m not a baby now, am I? Here, look at this!”
He strode over to the wall and, dragging out two chairs, he placed them in the middle of the room, back to back, about fifteen inches apart, and before his mother realized what he was doing he had climbed up and stood with one leg on the back of each chair.
“I should like to see a baby who could do this,” he cried, with his face wet with tears. “You needn’t lift me down. I can get down by myself. Babies can’t do tricks like these or even wipe up the spoons and forks or sweep the passage. But you needn’t cut it off if you don’t want to. I’ll bear it as long as you like. Only don’t cry any more, because it makes me miserable. If I cry when I fall down or when you pull my hair when you’re combing it you always tell me to bear it like a man and not be a baby, and now you’re crying yourself just because I’m not a baby. You ought to be jolly glad that I’m nearly grown up into a man, because you know I’ve promised to build you a house with the money I earn, and then you needn’t do no more work. We’ll have a servant the same as the people downstairs, and Dad can stop at home and sit by the fire and read the paper or play with me and Maud and have pillow fights and tell stories and—”
“It’s all right, dearie,” said Nora, kissing him. “I’m not crying now, and you mustn’t either, or your eyes will be all red and you won’t be able to go with Charley at all.”
When she had finished dressing him, Frankie sat for some time in silence, apparently lost in thought. At last he said:
“Why don’t you get a baby, Mother? You could nurse it, and I could have it to play with instead of going out in the street.”
“We can’t afford to keep a baby, dear. You know, even as it is, sometimes we have to go without things we want because we haven’t the money to buy them. Babies need many things that cost lots of money.”
“When I build our house when I’m a man, I’ll take jolly good care not to have a gas-stove in it. That’s what runs away with all the money; we’re always putting pennies in the slot. And that reminds me: Charley said I’ll have to take a ha’penny to put in the mishnery box. Oh, dear, I’m tired of sitting still. I wish he’d come. What time is it now, Mother?”
Before she could answer both Frankie’s anxiety and the painful ordeal of sitting still were terminated by the loud peal at the bell announcing Charley’s arrival, and Frankie, without troubling to observe the usual formality of looking out of the window to see if it was a runaway ring, had clattered half-way downstairs before he heard his mother calling him to come back for the halfpenny; then he clattered up again and then down again at such a rate and with so much noise as to rouse the indignation of all the respectable people in the house.
When he arrived at the bottom of the stairs he remembered that he had omitted to say goodbye, and as it was too far to go up again he rang the bell and then went into the middle of the road and looked up at the window that Nora opened.