When I saw her, I did not mind so much, she was just a baby, and I loved babies.
Walter did not mind the baby being a girl. He wanted it to be called Eleanor after his mother. He was worried and irritable at this time; he did not like the monthly nurse, nor the household being upset. The meals were not punctual, he said, specially breakfast, and if breakfast was late, it upset his morning’s work.
He was busy with his book just then; he had made, he thought, a new discovery about his script and that made him irritable.
‘I don’t know what I shall do if that baby cries in the morning,’ he said; ‘it will drive me frantic.’
She had cried in the garden in her pram; she was only a week old.
I asked the nurse to put the pram round the other side of the house. She had put it there, she said, so as not to disturb me.
Walter kept coming to me about things that went wrong.
The laundry had torn his shirt, and he could not find his sleeve-links; it was odd how he seemed to depend on me, as though he were a child almost; I had hardly realized how much before, and I was glad in a way.
‘It shows I am some use to him,’ I thought, ‘in spite of the pheasant and the accounts’; and yet sometimes I was sad about it too.
Mrs. Simms had said to me once: