Still, that was in August, and they could put a good half of it down to the hot weather.

Besides, the Baby got over it. With all its accusing and witnessing, it was, as Ranny said, a forgiving little thing; it had never in its life done anybody any harm. It did not hurt Violet now.

And the hot days passed; weeks passed; months passed, and winter and spring. The Baby had one little attack after another. It marked the passage of the months by its calamities; and still these might be put down to the cold weather or the stress of teething. Then, in a temperate week of May, nineteen-six, it did something decisive. It nearly died again of enteritis; and again it was forgiving and got over it.

There could be no doubt that things would have been simpler if it had been cruel enough to die. For the question was: What were they to do now?

Things, Ransome said, had got to be different. They couldn't go on as they were. The anxiety and the discomfort were intolerable. Still, that he had conceived an end to them, showed that he did not yet utterly despair of Violet. She had been terrified by the behavior of the Baby and by the things, the brutal things, the doctor had said to her, and she had made another effort. Ransome's trouble was simply that he couldn't trust her. He said to himself that she had good instincts and good impulses if you could depend on them. But you couldn't. With all her obstinacy she had no staying-power. He recognized in her a lamentable and inveterate flabbiness.

If he had known all about her he might have formed a larger estimate of her staying-power. But he did not yet know what she was. That bad word that he had once let out through the window had been in Ranny's simple mind a mere figure of speech, a flowering expletive, flung to the dark, devoid of meaning and of fitness. He did not know what Violet's impulses and her instincts really were. He did not know that what he called her flabbiness was the inertia in which they stored their strength, nor that in them there remained a vigilant and indestructible soul, biding its time, holding its own against maternity, making more and more for self-protection, for assertion, for supremacy. He felt her mystery, but he had never known the ultimate secret of this woman who ate at his board and slept in his bed and had borne his child. It was with his eternal innocence that he put it to her, What were they to do now?

And that implacable and inscrutable soul in her was ready for him. It prompted her to say that she couldn't do more than she did, and that if things were to be different he must get some one else to see to them. He must keep a servant. He should have kept one for her long ago.

Poor Ranny protested that he'd keep twenty servants for her if he could afford it. As it was, a charwoman every week was more than he could manage, and she knew it. And she said, looking at him very straight, that there was one way they could do it. They could do as other people did. In half the houses in the Avenue they let apartments. They must take a lodger.

Violet had thrown out this suggestion more than once lately. And he had put his foot down. Neither he nor Granville, he said, could stand a lodger. A lodger would make Granville too hot by far to hold him.

Now in their stress he owned that there was something in it. He would think it over.

Thinking it over, he saw more than ever how impossible it was. The charwoman, advancing more and more, had been a fearful strain on his resources, and the expenses of the Baby's birth had brought them to the breaking-point. And then there had been Baby's illnesses. Before that there was the perambulator.

But that was worth it. He remembered how last year he had seen an enormous poster in High Street, with the words in scarlet letters: "Are you With or Without a Pram for Baby?" He had realized then for the first time that he was without one. And the scarlet letters had burnt themselves into his brain, until, for the very anguish of it, he had gone and bought a pram and wheeled it home under cover of the darkness, disguised in its brown-paper wrappings to heighten the surprise of it. Violet had not been half so pleased nor yet surprised as he had expected; but he had got his money back again and again on that pram with the fun he'd had out of it.

But before that again, in their first year, things had had to be done for the house and garden. Ranny shuddered now when he thought of what the lawn-mower alone had cost him. And that tree! And then the little pleasures and the outings—when he totted them all up he found that he had taken Violet to Earl's Court and the Coliseum far, far oftener than he could have believed possible. Looking back on that first year, he seemed to have been always taking her somewhere. She wasn't happy when he didn't.

No, and she hadn't been very happy when he did. He would never forget that week they had spent at Southend last Whitsuntide, when he got his holiday. And it had all eaten into money. Not that he grudged it; but the fact remained. His margin was gone; half his savings were gone; his income had suffered a permanent shrinkage of two pounds a year.

Impossible to keep a servant without the aid of the lodger he abhorred. But with it not only possible but easy, easy as saying how d'you do. Except for the presence of the loathsome lodger, nothing would be changed. The back bedroom was there all ready, eating its head off; and for all they used the front sitting-room, they might just as well not have had one.

They could get somebody who would be out all day.

He thought about it for three weeks; but before he made up his mind he talked it over with his mother. She had come to see them late one evening in June, and he had walked back with her. She was tired, she said, and they had found a seat in a little three-cornered grove where the public footpath goes to Wandsworth High Street.

In this favorable retreat Ranny disclosed to his mother as much as he could of his affairs. Mrs. Ransome didn't like the idea of the lodger any more than he did, but she admitted that it was a way out of it. "Only," she said, "if I was you I should have a lady. Some one you know about. Some one who might look after Vi'let."

"That's right. But Virelet would have to look after her, you see."

"Vi'let's no more idea of looking after anybody than the cat."

"It isn't her fault, Mother."

"I'm not saying it's her fault. But it's a pity all the same you should have to put up with it."

"It's larks for me to what Vi puts up with. I shouldn't mind, if—"

He drew back, shy before the trouble of his soul.

"If what, Ranny?" she said, gently.

"If she seemed to care a bit more for the kid. Sometimes I think she actually—"

Though he could not say it, Mrs. Ransome knew.

"Don't you think that, Ranny. Don't you think it, my dear."

She was playing at the old game of hiding things, and she expected him to keep it up. She had never admitted for one moment that his father drank; and she wasn't going to admit, or to let him admit, for a moment that his wife was a bad mother.

So she changed the subject.

"That's a nice little girl I see sometimes down at your place. That Winny Dymond. Is she a friend of Vi'let's?"

Ranny said she was.

"Has Vi'let known her long?"

"I think so. I can't say exactly how long."

"Before she was married?"

"Yes."

Something in his manner made her pause, pondering.

"Did you know her before you married, Ran?"

"Ages before."

His mother sighed.

"I suppose," said Ranny, harking back, "some women are like that."

"Like what now?" She didn't want to go back to it. She was afraid of what she might be driven to say.

"Not caring much about their own kids."

"Oh, Ranny, why do you 'arp on it?"

"Because I don't understand it. It's just the one thing I can't understand. What does it mean, Mother?"

"Well, my dear, sometimes it means that they can't care for anything but their 'usbands. It's 'usband, 'usband with them all the time. There's some," she elaborated, "that care most for their 'usbands, and there's some that care most for their children."

(He wondered which would Winny Dymond care for most?)

"And there's some," said Mrs. Ransome, "that care most for both, and care different, and that's best."

(Winny, he somehow fancied, would have been that sort.)

"Which did you care for most, Mother?"

"You mustn't ask me that question, Ranny. I can't answer it."

But he knew. He felt her yearning toward him even then. There was something very artful, and at the same time very comforting, about his mother. She had made him feel that Violet was all right, that he was all right, that everything, in fact, was all right; that he was, indeed, twice blest since he had a wife who loved him better than her child, and a mother who loved him better than her husband.

"Talking of husbands," he said, "how's the Torpichen Badger?"

She shook her head at him in the old way; keeping it up.

"Oh, Ranny, you mustn't call your father that."

"Why not?"

"It's a whisky, my dear."

(He could have sworn there was the ghost of a smile about her soft mouth.)

"So it is. I forgot. Well, how's the Hedgehog?"

For all her smile Mrs. Ransome seemed to be breaking down all of a sudden, as if in another moment the truth would have come out of her; but she recovered, and she kept it up.

"He's had the Headache come on more than ever. I've never known a time when His Headache has been so bad. Most constant it is."

Ranny preserved a respectful silence.

"He's worrying. That's what it is. Your father's got too much on His mind. The business isn't doing quite so well as it did now He can't see to things. And here's Mercier saying that he's going to leave."

"What? Old Eno? What's he want to leave for?"

"To better himself, I suppose. You can't blame him."

They rose and went on their way that plunged presently into Wandsworth High Street.

By the time he got home again Ransome had braced himself to the prospect of the thing he hated. They might let the rooms, perhaps, for a little while, say, till Michaelmas when he would have got his rise. Yes, perhaps; if they could find a lady.

But Violet wouldn't hear of a lady. Ladies gave too much trouble; they nagged at you, and they beat you down.

Well, then, if she liked, a gentleman. A gentleman who would be out all day, and whose hours of occupation would coincide strictly with his own. But he impressed it on her that no rooms were to be let in his absence to any applicant whom he had not first inspected.

So they settled it.

Then, as if they had scented trouble, Mr. and Mrs. Usher came up from Hertfordshire the very next Saturday. They looked strangely at each other when the idea of the lodger was put before them, and Mr. Usher took Ranny out into the garden.

"I wouldn't do it," Mr. Usher said. "Let her work, let her work with her 'ands. A big, strapping girl like her, it won't hurt her. Why, my Missis there could turn out your little doll-'ouse in a hour. Don't you take no gentlemen lodgers. Don't you let her do it, Randall, my boy, or there'll be trouble."

The advice came too late. That very evening Violet informed her husband that she had let the rooms.

And while Ranny raged she assured him that it was all right. She had done exactly what he had told her. She had let them to a friend of his—Leonard Mercier.