"'If Chris is to be inebriate, criminal, vicious, even irresponsible, as his father must be,' Alex says, 'Nature wants nothing of the sort. She wants to be rid of him as quickly as possible. How do you know what you are saving?'
"'How do you know,' Robin says, 'what you are letting go?'
"'I can take the risk if Nature can,' he contends.
"She sat up in her chair, her eyes bright as the daylight, and I thought her eagerness and earnestness was on her like a garment.
"'You have nobody to refer the risk to,' Robin says, 'Nature has us. And for one, I take it. So far as Chris is concerned, Alex, if no one claims him, I want him never to be out of touch with me.'
"But when a woman begins to wear that garment, the man that's in love with her—unless he is the special kind—he begins thinking how much sweeter and softer and womaner she is when she's just plain gentle. And he always gets uneasy and wants her to be the gentle way he remembers her being—that is, unless he's special, unless he's special. Like Alex got uneasy now.
"'My heavens, dear,' he says—and I judged Alex had got to be one of them men that lays a lace 'dear' over a haircloth tone of voice, and so solemnly believes they're keeping their temper—'My heavens, dear, don't misunderstand me. Experiment as much as you like. Material is cheap and abundant. If you don't feel the responsibility, have him educated wherever you want to. But don't expect me to play father to him. The personal contact is going it a little too strong.'
"'That is exactly what he most needs,' says Robin.
"'Come, dear,' says Alex, 'that's elemental—in an age when everybody can do things better than one can do them oneself.'
"She didn't say nothing, and just set there, with her tea. Alex was watching her, and I knew just about as sure what he was thinking as though I had been his own thought, oozing out of his mind. He was watching her with satisfaction, patterned off with a kind of quiet amusement and jabbed into by a kind of worryin' wonder. How exactly, he was thinking, she was the type everlasting of Wife. She was girlish, and in little things she was all I'll-do-as-you-say, and she was even shy; he believed that he was marrying a girl whose experience of the world was commendably slight, whose ideas about it was kind of vague—commendably again; and whose ways was easy-handled, like skein silk. By her little firmnesses, he see that she had it in her to be firm, but what he meant was that she should adopt his ideas and turn firm about them. He had it all planned out that he was going to embroider her brain with his notions of what was what. But all of a sudden, now and then, there she was confronting him as she had just done then with a serious, settled look of Woman—the Woman everlasting, wanting a garden, wanting to work, wanting a child....