Three minutes later, while he was bent over the lavatory basin,
someone burst into the bathroom. He lifted a soapy face.
It was Nellie, with disturbed features.
"What's this about your positively promising to take Maisie to London
to-morrow to choose a doll?"
"I'll take 'em all," he replied with absurd levity. "And you too!"
"But really--" she pouted, indicating that he must not carry the
ridiculous too far.
"Look here, d----n it," he said impulsively, "I _want_ you to come.
And I want you to come to-morrow. I knew it was the confounded infants
you wouldn't leave. You don't mean to tell me you can't arrange it--a
woman like you!"
She hesitated.
"And what am I to do with three children in a London hotel?"
"Take nurse, naturally."
"Take nurse?" she cried.
He imitated her, with a grotesque exaggeration, yelling loudly, "Take
nurse?" Then he planted a soap-sud on her fresh cheek.
She wiped it off carefully, and smacked his arm. The next moment she
was gone, having left the door open.
"He _wants_ me to go to London to-morrow," he could hear her saying to
his mother on the landing.
"Confound it!" he thought. "Didn't she know that at dinner-time?"
"Bless us!" His mother's voice.
"And take the children--and nurse!" His wife continued, in a tone
to convey the fact that she was just as much disturbed as her
mother-in-law could possibly be by the eccentricities of the male.
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