parlor, or tramping about the house and waking the children. But by and by, when the teething worry was over, and the idols went to sleep at proper hours, leaving mamma time to rest, she began to miss John, and find her workbasket dull company, when he was not sitting opposite in his old dressing-gown, comfortably scorching his slippers on the fender. She would not ask him to stay at home, but felt injured because he did not know that she wanted him without being told, entirely forgetting the many evenings he had waited for her in vain. She was nervous and worn out with watching and worry, and in that unreasonable frame of mind which the best of mothers occasionally experience when domestic cares oppress them. Want of exercise robs them of cheerfulness, and too much devotion to that idol of American women, the teapot, makes them feel as if they were all nerve and no muscle.
“Yes,” she would say, looking in the glass, “I’m getting old and ugly; John doesn’t find me interesting any longer, so he leaves his faded wife and goes to see his pretty neighbor, who has no incumbrances. Well, the babies love me; they don’t care if I am thin and pale, and haven’t time to crimp my hair; they are my comfort, and some day John will see what I’ve gladly sacrificed for them, won’t he, my precious?”
To which pathetic appeal Daisy would answer with a coo, or Demi with a crow, and Meg would put by her lamentations for a maternal revel, which soothed her solitude for the time being. But the pain increased as politics absorbed John, who was always running over to discuss interesting points with Scott, quite unconscious that Meg missed him. Not a word did she say, however, till her mother found her in tears one day, and insisted on knowing what the matter was, for Meg’s drooping spirits had not escaped her observation.
“I wouldn’t tell anyone except you, mother; but I really do need advice, for, if John goes on so much longer I might as well be widowed,” replied Mrs. Brooke, drying her tears on Daisy’s bib, with an injured air.