"Nice amateur talent!" I was fit to fly at him, and only the brutal—yes, the brutal—grasp of my husband kept me from rushing into the room and proclaiming "Mrs. De Vere's" antecedents—her artistic career sketched in a few bold touches.
The world would have ended then and there. But how delightful to have seen, first, his looks of blank horror at the idea of a daughter-in-law who had been used to rough it, and to make her little money go a fabulously long way.
"This is the daughter of Prof. Macfarlane!" he introduces me proudly sometimes. I wonder if he thinks a poor scientific man like papa could send all his young ravens about first-class, or keep a maid and a governess with one in various continental cities where she chose, as an eccentric whim, to abide and study art? What would he have said to my gloves in those earlier days when I earned nothing, and most of my allowance, beyond board and lodging, went for paints, and four pairs of dark, carefully chosen gloves had to go through the year? What to my lodgings at the tailor's—a poor cobbler-tailor, in Dresden? What to my lunches of Wurst beer and black bread? What to the concerts, where, in smoke and a three-penny seat, I heard music as good as plenty which costs me ten shillings to a guinea in London? What to all the cheek-by-jowl encounters with the peasants in our cheap, rapturously happy sketching tours? Bah! the poor Irishman! As if he could guess anything about it! Why should I think twice of his "amateur talent" and other little pin-pricks when the stiff, starved man never had, in his whole life, one such happy day of honest work, utter freedom, and simplest, blissfullest pleasures as have been mine by scores? Be easy, Ronayne. Not for the Bohemian daughter-in-law shall apoplexy smite the sovereign of Castle Starched-stiff-O!—which sacrilegious parody shall be my only revenge.
And if I portray my baby in every week of her life, her father turns her to account no less. She is beginning to chatter like a wren, and Ronayne has a notebook devoted to her earliest attempts at speech—the sounds, as she is progressively able to make them—the easily-conquered ones, the impregnable rock-fortresses, the turns, substituted letters. Sometimes I get quite furious over this anatomical process. My darling says something with the dearest, sweetest, small voice:
"Oh, Ronayne!" I cry. "Did you hear? Three words together—'Pease, papa, tugar!'" And I smother her in ecstasy.
"Yes, love," says Ronayne. "And do you notice how she can manage s before a, and not before u? This morning I shook her, and nurse asked her, 'What does papa do?' 'S-ake a baby,' she answered—but she never says sugar. And there's the same——"
"Oh, you vivisecter," I broke in; "I'll have you to know, sir, that my baby's pretty lispings are not to be treated like the rudimental language of a philologist's offspring! Put up that abominable book this instant! Did a cruel father, my lammie, spear his own child with a wicked pin, and stick her up in a case?"
I am a happy woman, Susie. Too happy; I'm frightened at it. You, may be, don't see where this comes in. If you don't, never mind. My heart does run over nowadays for all sorts of reasons, and no-reasons.
Later on Ronayne told me, apropos of the Dialectical, that his objection was like the Frenchman's to the fox-hunt—"he'd been," if you please—went with Dr. Thunder and the Truth-Seeker just before our trip to Brighton. Then the subject under discussion was marriage, and Lady ——'s son read the paper—a long argument against monogamic marriage: In the light of experience and human reason it was monstrous to make the promises required at the altar; monogamic marriage fettered man, made his best capabilities impossible, made women hypocrites and slaves, made love commercial, was physiologically a cruelty and a mistake, and so on, and so on. "You don't love Lady ——'s son. You would love him less had you heard the things he found it possible to say before the fifty or sixty ladies who found it possible to listen to him, and to take some active part in the discussion that succeeded.