"Richard Brewster!" she cried. Then wrath and a disheartening sense of the futility of unassisted moral suasion quite swept her off her feet. She seized the child and laying him across her lap in time-honoured fashion, handed down from a remote ancestry, spanked him with a speed and thoroughness not to be surpassed by Grandmother Carroll in her most energetic mood.
Elizabeth was fluttering anxiously about the table in her small dining-room when her husband entered in his usual breezy fashion and laid a bunch of fragrant carnations before her.
"A finishing touch for your table, Betty," he said; and added with lover-like enthusiasm, "My! how pretty you're looking to-night!"
"I shouldn't think I'd look pretty after the day I've put in," she told him as she arranged the flowers in water. "Sam, Mrs. Van Duser was here to luncheon."
"She came to ask me if I had read 'Anthropological Investigations on one thousand children, white and colored,' and I hadn't even looked at it."
"So you flatly flunked the exam; poor Betty!"
"Not exactly, Sam; I--told her I didn't quite--understand the subject."
"Ah, Machiavellian Betty! Did she tumble?"
"Oh, Sam! what a way to speak of Mrs. Van Duser. I was the one to tumble, as you call it. She graciously picked me up. Of course Doris was naughty, and Celia spilled cocoa on the table-cloth and passed everything on the wrong side. Then after Mrs. Van Duser went, Evelyn came.--She's up-stairs now, dressing for dinner. And--after that--I don't know what you'll think of me, Sam; but I--was nervous or something I think, and I--whipped Richard."
"After all I've said about Marian Stanford, too! I just hate myself for doing it. But I had dressed that child twice all clean, and when I came down to see about dinner and found him playing in the aquarium _again_, Sam, dripping water all over the floor, and with his clothes soaked to the skin, I just seemed to lose all control of myself. I snatched the poor darling up and--and--spanked him as hard as I could. The strange part of it is that I--seemed to enjoy doing it."
Her doleful air of abject contrition was too much for Sam. He roared with irrepressible laughter. "Forgive me, Betty," he entreated; "but really, you know----"