“I wasn’t alluding to dress. What I am wearing here will answer, of course--but I was thinking of the arrangements for the nurse. Will we take his old colored nurse, or do you suppose she would not be equal to the requirements of the trip? Had Elise better go in her place?”
“Oh, that cuts no ice. For the baby won’t go at all,” he replied, as simply as if this were an obvious conclusion.
She sat petrified for one moment. Then she found her voice--loud and strong and definite.
“The baby won’t go!” she exclaimed. “Then I won’t go--not one foot! What do you take me for?”
He looked angry, as always, when opposed, but not surprised. He had evidently anticipated her objection, and he controlled himself with care unusual to his ungoverned temper. “Who wants to go dragging a child three years old all around Europe and the Holy Land! You won’t be gone more than a year!”
“A year! Why, Edward--are you crazy? To think I would leave the baby for a year! No--nor a month! No--nor a day! He has scarcely been out of my sight for two hours together since he was born.”
“How many women leave their children to take a trip abroad,” he argued, and she began to feel vaguely that he would much prefer that she should agree peaceably--he was even willing to exert such self-control as was necessary to persuade her.
“Never--never would I,” she declared, “and he would be miserable without me.”
“Not with me here,” her husband urged. “He is pleased to regard me with considerable favor.” And he bent upon her his rare, intimate, confidential smile.
For, unknown to him, she had been at great pains to build up a sort of idolatry of his father in the breast of the little boy, such as children usually feel without prompting. He was taught to disregard Floyd-Rosney’s averse, selfish inattention, to rejoice and bask in the sun of his favor, to run to greet him with pretty little graces, to admire him extravagantly as the finest man in all the world, to regulate his infantile conduct by the paternal prepossessions, being stealthily rewarded by his mother whenever his wiles attained the meed of praise.
“You know, dearest, I am held here by the pressure of that villainous lawsuit, and as it will absorb all my leisure I thought that now is your chance for your Oriental tour--for I really don’t care to go again, and you may never have another opportunity.”