I could not help smiling as I rang Mrs. Kit Carmichael’s bell. It wanted a good hour to calling time, and I was sure to arrive in that embarrassing period of the afternoon when morning attire is being exchanged for the tea-gown, and the indiscreet visitor is left to meditate on the hollowness of social obligations in an empty drawing-room. It is an hour I take a peculiar delight in. I like to see the piano before Schubert’s songs have replaced the thumbed exercise-book, and to divine midday practisings, scarcely over, by young ladies lanky in stocking, with surreptitious chewing-gum in their pockets. It has still the charm that “going behind” had for me in my early theatrical days.

I had made some masculine pretext for leaving Carrie behind, and she was to follow later. I had a small reason of my own for wishing to see Mrs. Kit alone.

Mrs. Kit’s maid admitted me. That young person always seems inclined to laugh when she sees me. I swear I have never encouraged her.

The drawing-room door was opened to me, but I walked past it, beckoned by a distant sound of childish romping, and a young mother’s call of “Come here, Chris.” I made all the noise in my approach that pretended stealth demanded; I am delicate in my freedom.

Now, that is a part that needs a nice discrimination in the true performing of it. Intimacy has no severer test. Show me the indiscreet bachelor friend whose title falls short, be it only by a syllable, of the full warranty, and I will show you a man who shall wait for invitations, and to whom the fiery sword of “not at home” shall be displayed. The young wife in particular is apt to be touchy.

My approach had been heard, and a subdued scuffling subsided as I entered the half-open nursery door. Mrs. Kit had a maid, and had at one time kept a nurse; but the nurse had gracefully relinquished the engagement on finding she had two children in charge, the grown-up one scarcely more manageable than the chubby little imp who bore his father’s name. Consequently, Master Christopher occupied a good deal of his mother’s time, and was in a fair way for being spoiled.

This young gentleman of four hailed me with a shout, and childish glee in his scantiness of garment; while his mother, rosy and bright with romping, did her best to look crossly on my intrusion. Mrs. Carmichael always keeps up an appearance of formality, even with me.

“Mr. Butterfield, how dare you come into my nursery!”

“Mrs. Carmichael,” I replied, “I came to have a talk with your son in the matter of a certain giant in whom we are both interested. Perhaps you yourself would care——”

“Chris shall not hear any story till he has his pinafore on. It is as well you are a bachelor, Mr. Butterfield. You would spoil the best child in the world.”

“Unless I am mistaken, Mrs. Kit,” I answered, “you yourself were playing the part of a bear when I entered. Does one hunt bears without a pinafore?”

“I am his mother, and have to amuse him—judiciously!” returned Mrs. Carmichael. “You don’t know what a responsibility children are, Mr. Butterfield.”

“I appreciate your feelings, madam,” I replied. “I remember in my youth I kept white mice. Now, white mice——”

“White fiddlesticks,” said Mrs. Kit. “A bachelor has absolutely no idea of what trouble children are. They take the whole of your time—they are constantly to be watched—you never know what mischief they are up to.”

“I kept four white mice, Mrs. Carmichael, with power to add. You have only one——”

“Oh, but Chris is so mischievous! He’s so full of spirits. Scarcely an hour since he nearly broke his neck trying to climb a handrail, under the impression it was a beanstalk—that was one of your stories, Mr. Butterfield,—and last night he managed to get Simple Simon into his prayers.”

I shook my head.

“An inherited irreligious tendency,” I replied. “He’s probably got that from his father. I remember Kit——”

“Rubbish! It’s just pure animal spirits. Chris is getting so big and strong—and noisy,” she added, as Chris broke away with the shout of pagan infancy.

“In that case, Mrs. Carmichael,” I answered, “a reducing diet of cinder-tea, judiciously administered——”

“Cinder-tea? What do you know about cinder-tea?—Chris, put your arm through here—a bachelor talking about cinder-tea!”

The arrogance of these young married ladies! They are all alike. You may have seen scores of such pretty innocents installed in their first establishments. You may have known their existences from the time they played peg-top with their brothers to their perky airs over their first long frocks. You may have given them away amid rice and slippers at the rate of two a year, when their bridal blushes almost made your task superfluous. You may have known them from teething-ring to trousseau, from measles to marriage; and yet in the first wonder of a new baby life you will be told that you are an ignorant old bachelor, and that you know nothing of household affairs!

But I was not disposed to take any such talk from Mrs. Kit Carmichael. I was too old a friend of Carmichael’s, and could always make her tingle with curiosity by an artful hint of pre-nuptial reminiscence. Besides which, she herself was too much in my power. Distinctly, I had a right to rebuke her. I leaned back, and questioned her with forensic severity.

“Mrs. Carmichael,” I said, “you are young, but that is no excuse for ingratitude. Five years ago my advice was not superfluous. Whose experience was it selected you this little house, when Kit’s mind was too full of love to distinguish such details as sanitary arrangements?”

“I believe you gave some advice on the subject, Mr. Butterfield,” she retorted, “and we had workmen about the place for six months.”

I waived the thanklessness of the last phrase, and continued with dignity.

“Who put you through an exhaustive course of salads, Mrs. Carmichael?”

“Well, you were rather useful in the matter of salads,” she admitted reluctantly.

“Who gave you lessons in the refinements of black coffee?” I continued, warming in a righteous cause.

“My coffee was not bad,” Mrs. Kit returned, on her defence.

I magnanimously put aside criticism of her coffee, and went on with a wave of my hand.

“To whom did you come for counsel on distemper and wall decoration and tapestry hanging? Who told you to cast on at the bottom in mending stocking knees? Who explained to you the principle of the chimney draught, the law of ventilation, and the mechanics of the picture-cord? Answer me, Mrs. Carmichael.”

She combed Master Chris’s hair vigorously and made no response. I saw the victory of a just rebuke within my grasp. I made one more thrust.

“And, finally, Mrs. Carmichael, have you made the treacle puffs you promised for my next visit?”

She yielded.

“Oh, I am so sorry, Mr. Butterfield, but they were a failure. I put them into the oven, and all the treacle ran, and made, oh, such a mess!”

I leaned back with the magnanimity of a conqueror, and in that moment lost the battle. Carrie stood in the doorway.

“Treacle puffs, Rollo!” she said. “Of course they run if you forget the bread crumbs. I told you that!”

I was betrayed by her I called sister! A light came into Mrs. Kit’s eyes.

“Did you give him those recipes, Carrie?” she asked.

“Of course I did, Alice, and told him to be sure to tell you about the bread crumbs. And he didn’t! Oh, Rollo”—she turned to me—“and you asked me if they would be sure to run without the bread crumbs!”

I was lost. Mrs. Carmichael rose, and put aside the brush and comb.

“So, Mr. Butterfield,” she said. “I begin to see. You laid a trap for me. You got Caroline to coach you in things before coming to see me, and edited the recipes! Let me remember. You told me, did you not, that brown sugar improved poached eggs?”

“Mrs. Carmichael——” I began. She silenced me with a gesture.

“You advised me, did you not, that maccaroni should be kept in a dark place for fear it should sprout?”

“That, Mrs. Carmichael, was on the authority of the Times. You surely——”

Again the peremptory finger reduced me to dumbness.

“And you stepped in after all my blunders, and airily set me right! Mr. Butterfield, you are an unspeakable deception!”

That was my thanks. Carrie and I might conspire to do good by stealth—I might go out of my way to gather hints on pastry—and because, forsooth, this woman’s execution was not equal to the brilliance of the idea, I was to be branded as a fraud! The brown sugar was an original notion; and if, forsooth, like the Great Eastern, it turned out unmanageable in practice, that did not detract from the boldness of the conception. Women are so conservative; they lack the true inventor’s spirit.

I looked helplessly round the room. I was overpowered at the ease with which people will impute to one a base motive rather than go out of the beaten track to find a good one. How they give themselves away!

I turned and apostrophised Master Christopher.

“My poor, unwitting little boy! For you, too, the time shall come when ingratitude shall be your portion. You are a bachelor yourself—you drink cinder-tea, but the day shall arrive when you shall be told you know less about it than the hand that pours it out. Play while you can. Your least word is heeded now; but afterwards you shall cry wisdom in the nursery and shall not be regarded.”

Chris saw somehow that he was the subject of remark, and now, trimly toileted and elaborately combed, was ready for a story grim in giant and spiced with goblin. His mother, laughing at my apostrophe, made a chubby fleshy fold in the childish cheek that was pressed against her own, and looked at me in a way that admitted my capacity in fairy lore, if it discounted my more practical qualifications.

“Now, Chris,” she said, “Mr. Butterfield is going to tell you just a short story, and I’m going to receive my callers. Don’t be long, Mr. Butterfield. Come, Caroline.”

She vanished, and I entered the magic land of giants.