“Mr. Malory always told me your husband was a very handsome man. Are any of your children like him?”
I wished that Malory could have seen the softening of her face when I spoke of her children.
“No, sir,” she said, and I could have sworn I heard an exultant note in her voice. “They mostly take after their grandmother, I think,” and indeed I could see in the sleeping baby an absurd resemblance to Mrs. Pennistan. “Now my sister’s children, she has two, and one is fair like her, and one is as dark as my husband.”
I do not know what impulse moved me to rise and go over to the cage of mice.
“I have heard of these, too, from Mr. Malory,” I said. “You have had them six, seven, eight years now?”
“Oh, sir,” she cried amused, “those are not the pair Mr. Malory gave me. Those are their great-great-great-great, I don’t know how many greats, grandchildren. I’ve bred from them and bred from them; they’re friendly little things, and the children like them.”
“How do they breed now?” I asked.
“Well,” she replied, “they mostly come brown, I notice; I fancy the strain’s wearing out. From time to time I’ll get a black and white that doesn’t waltz—waltzing mice Mr. Malory used to call them—and from time to time I’ll get a waltzer; there was a lot of them at first, one or two in a litter, but they’re getting rare. That little fellow,” she said, pointing—and as she stood beside me I was conscious of her softness and warmth, and felt myself faintly troubled—“I’ve known him waltz once only since I’ve had him, which is since he was born. I look at them,” she added unexpectedly, “when they’re blind and pink in the nest, and wonder which’ll grow up brown and which’ll waltz and which be just piebald.”
“You speak like Mr. Malory,” I said.
She laughed as she turned away.