IPE your boots well," commanded Mrs. Ranger insistently from the "kitchen, "bring your overcoat through to the scullery, 'ang up your hat, and walk quiet."
A large, mild-looking man, with his face set in a frame of light whiskers, came obediently on tip-toe through the passage. Mrs. Ranger, looking up from her desperate work of ironing, frowned at her husband.
"Ah!" she said bitterly, as she took a fresh iron from the fire and placed it perilously near to her plump cheek to test its warmth, "I see what you want to do. You want to wake up baby."
"I can't altogether say," replied Mr. Ranger, with the cautious air of one anxious not to irritate by direct contradiction, "as I do."
"Oh, yes, you do," she declared emphatically; "and don't you go hinting that I'm a story-teller the moment you put foot inside the 'ouse." Mr. Ranger, in the scullery, sighed. "What's it you say?"
"Never said nothing," he replied soothingly.
"That's your low artfulness," retorted Mrs. Ranger. "If you were anything like a man, you'd answer a civil question when it was put to you."
She ironed hard for a few minutes, not feeling sure of her argumentative ground; but when Mr. Ranger, having washed his face at the sink, reappeared, she was again ready for the attack.
"What makes you 'ome so early to-night?" she demanded.
"Committee meeting didn't last long," explained her husband. "I'd got everything ready for 'em, and they'd only got to agree with it all."
"And the rest, I s'pose, are drinking away in public-'ouses like anything, and never giving a thought to their poor, 'ard-working wives at home."
"Well, my dear," he said genially, from the fireplace, "they ain't 'usbands of yours."
"Don't throw that in my face, John," she said pathetically. "I know as well as you do that I could have made a better marriage than I did; but don't, don't"
"What I mean to say is"
"I know what you mean, John," she said tearfully, "but I don't think you ought to turn against me. It's bad enough when I go home on Sundays and take baby, to hear my sisters talk. 'Well, Emily,' they say, 'whatever you could see in the man beats me.'"
Mr. Ranger hummed a cheerful tune and opened the evening paper.
"I suppose I must have been off me 'ead," said Mrs. Ranger, as one anxious to find excuses for grievous error. "I can't account for it any other way." She turned a white garment, pressed heavily on the iron, and ran it up and down. "If you'd been good looking, I could have understood it."
Mr. Ranger laughed.
"I was never what you'd call a pretty man," he said jovially.
"If you'd had a pleasant manner about you," went on Mrs. Ranger, "that would have been something. As it is," here she touched her eyes with a corner of her apron, "as it is, I'm simply a laughin'-stock for one and all."
"I say, my dear," protested Mr. Ranger, "really!"
"Oh! a lot you care!" she cried fractiously, and applying herself again to her work. "I tell you, I'm getting pretty well tired of it. There's only one good thing about it," she said, with gloomy hopefulness, "it can't last after I'm dead and gone."
"Shall I read to you?" asked Mr. Ranger submissively, after a pause.
Mr. Ranger selected a column in the back page of his evening paper, a column in which unexpected aphorisms had for next-door neighbours a cookery recipe or a hint on fashions.
"'It is stated,'" read out Mr. Ranger, "'that black velvet will be all the rage during the ensuing season; it will not, however, be worn by—by débutantes.'"
"By what?"
"By—by débutantes," repeated Mr. Ranger doubtfully.
"Don't you dare refer to such creatures!" ordered Mrs. Ranger solemnly, and Mr. Ranger proceeded, in a chastened tone—
"'An old Oriental saying is to the effect that a wife and her husband should meet but once.'"
"There's something in that."
"'If all the hairpins that are lost in London during a year were placed on end, they would reach part of the way to the North Pole.'"
"Well, I never!" exclaimed Mrs. Ranger, now genuinely interested. "Is that a fact, John?"
"It's in the paper."
"Wonder where they pick up such things."
"'A useful sideboard,'" read on Mr. Ranger, greatly encouraged, "'may be made by procuring three old orange boxes, staining them the colour of mahogany'"
"Your mother never said anything more about that chest of drawers of hers," said Mrs. Ranger, reminded of one of her numerous grievances. "That's your family all over."
"Understanding was," he remarked gently, "that you should have 'em when she was gone."
"She don't show much signs of going."