"I fear you have been dreaming, instead of working," she said, looking at him with a kind of pitying admiration. Ralph, too, had grown handsomer, so his wife thought, since she had him to look after. How, indeed, could it be otherwise?
She rose and went towards him.
"Sun down, now, children, and play on the grass," she said. "Sun, chicks—off with you—shoo!" and she flirted her apron after them as she did when she scattered the chickens from the dairy door. The pinafored people fled shrieking across the grass, tumbling over each other in riotous heaps.
Then Winsome went over and kissed her husband. He was looking so handsome that he deserved it. And she did not do it too often. She was glad that she had made him wear a beard. She put one of her hands behind his head and the other beneath his chin, tilting his profile with the air of a connoisseur. This can only be done in one position.
"Well, does it suit your ladyship?" said Ralph.
She gave him a little box on the ear.
"I knew," he said, "that you wanted to come and sit on my knee!"
"I never did," replied Winsome with animation, making a statement almost certainly inaccurate upon the face of it.
"That's why you sent away the children," he went on, pinching her ear.
"Of all things in this world," said Winsome indignantly, "commend me to a man for conceit!"