Harriett sadly shook her head. "You don't understand women, Ted," she said.
"And I don't want to—if that's what they're like!" he retorted hotly.
"I'm afraid Deane didn't—manage very well," sighed Harriett.
"Who wants to manage such a little fool!" snapped Ted.
"Now, Ted—" she began, but "You make me tired, Harriett!" he broke in passionately, and no more was said of it then.
They worked in silence for awhile, Ted raising a great deal of dust in the way he threw things about, Harriett looking through a box of old books and papers, sighing often. Harriett sighed a great deal, it seemed to Ted, and yet something about Harriett made him sorry for her. From across the attic he looked at her, awkwardly sitting on the floor, leaning against an old trunk. She looked tired and he thought with compassion and remorse for the rough way he had spoken to her, of how her baby was only a little more than two months old, that it must be hard for her to be doing the things she was doing that week. Harriett had grown stout; she had that settled look of many women in middle life; she looked as if she couldn't change much—in any way. Well, Ted considered, he guessed Harriett couldn't change much; she was just fixed in the way she was and that was all there was to it. But she did not look happy in those things she had settled into; she looked patient. She seemed to think things couldn't be any different.
She was turning the pages of an old album she had taken from the box of her mother's things she was sorting. "Oh!" she exclaimed in a low voice, bending over the pages. Her tone brought Ted over to her. "A picture of Ruth as a baby," she murmured.
He knelt down and looked over her shoulder into the dusty, old-fashioned album at a picture of a baby a year or so old whose face was all screwed up into a delighted laugh, tiny hands raised up and clenched in the intensity of baby excitement, baby abandonment to the joyousness of existence.
"She was like that," murmured Harriett, a little tremulously. "She was the crowingest baby!"
They bent over it in silence for a minute. "Seems pretty tickled about things, doesn't she?" said Ted with a queer little laugh. Harriett sighed heavily, but a moment later a tear had fallen down to one of the baby hands clenched in joyousness; the tear made him forgive the sigh, and when he saw her carefully take the picture from the album and put it in the pocket of her big apron, it was a lot easier, somehow, to go on working with Harriett. It was even easy, after a little, to ask her what he wanted to know about Deane's practice.