“Look,” she would say, puckering up her face.
And to save from soilure the dainty fabric she was working at, I would rise and wipe her fingers with my handkerchief; whereupon she would coo out the sweetest “thank you,” in the world, and perhaps hold up a diminutive garment.
“Isn’t it pretty?”
“Yes, my dear,” I would say, and I would turn aside wondering at the exquisite refinements of pain that men were sometimes called upon to bear.
At last the time came. I sat up all night in a torture of suspense, having got it into my foolish head that Carlotta might die. The doctor came upon me at six in the morning sitting half frozen at the bottom of the stairs. When he gave me his cheery news he seemed to develop from a middle-aged, commonplace man into a radiant archangel.
I met Antoinette soon afterwards, busy, important, exultant. She nevertheless graciously accorded me a brief interview.
“And to think, Monsieur,” she exclaimed, as if the crowning triumph of a million ions of evolution had at, last been attained, “to think that it is a boy!”
“You would have been just as pleased if it had been a girl,” said I.
She shook her wise, fat head. “Women ca ne vaut pas grand’ chose.”
Let it be remembered that “women are of no great account” is a sentiment expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette. But all the same I soon found myself a cipher in the house, where the triumvirate of the negligible sex, Antoinette, the nurse and Carlotta, reigned despotically.