Molly had a coaster and an enormous rocking-horse. She had the car loaded and strapped and covered with packages. She had a tree, which she said she had stolen from the grocer; he would be duly enlightened and paid to-morrow.
She flung off her heavy coat, pinned back her heavy hair, tied on an apron. She snapped strings, scribbled cards. And she personally stuffed the three larger stockings.
Cassie assisted. Neither woman heard the clock strike ten, strike eleven.
“You’ll be a wreck to-morrow, my dear!”
“Oh, Molly, no! This is just doing me a world of good. I had been feeling so depressed and so worried. But I believe—I do believe—that the worst of it is over now!”
“Which one gets this modeling clay? It’s frightfully smelly stuff, but they all adore it! My dear, does Timmy usually sleep this way? I’ve looked in at him twice, he seems troubled—restless——”
“Yes—the scissors are there, right under your foot. Yes, he is like that, Molly, no real rest, and he doesn’t seem to have any particular life in him. He seems so languid. Nothing tastes exactly right to him and of course the children are noisy, and the house is small. I want him——”
Mrs. Rutledge, working away busily in the litter, and fastening a large tinsel ball to a fragrant bough with thin, work-worn hands, stepped back, squinted critically, and turned to the next task. The homely little room was fire-warmed. Mary Madison remembered some of the books, and the big lamp, and the arm-chair that had belonged to her father. Cassie had a sort of gift for home-making, even in a perfectly commonplace eight-room suburban house, she mused.
“I want him,” Cassie resumed presently, “to take us all down south somewhere—or to go by himself, for that matter!—and get a good rest. But he feels it isn’t fair to Jim Prescott—his partner, you know. Only—” reasoned the wife, threading glassy little colored balls with wire, “only Tim is the real brains of the business, and Jim Prescott knows it. Timmy does all the designing, and this year they’ve seemed to get their first real start—more orders than they can fill, really. And it worries Timmy to fall down just now! He wants to get back. But I feel that if he had a real rest——”
“I don’t know,” the physician answered, setting John’s big brown bear in an attitude of attack above the absurd little sock. “It’s a very common attitude, and nine times out of ten a man is happier in his work than idling. I’d let him go back, if I were you, I think.”