The baby fretted a little during its unaccustomed travelling, and, fretting, fretted its parents.  Osborn was dimly annoyed with Marie for not being able to keep the baby up to the best standard of infantile behaviour, feeling that the things he was called upon to do, in a public railway carriage, made him look a fool; and Marie was hurt with Osborn that he should show so little sympathy and patience.  She wrote, upon arrival, a letter to Mrs. Amber, which brought her down within a couple of days, to stay at a boarding-house within a stone’s throw.

Grandmother was very good.  She was always nice-tempered and kind and soothing.  In the morning she came round early to the rooms in a side street, and took the baby out for his airing upon the promenade, so that Marie and Osborn might bathe together.  She it was who persuaded their landlady to take charge of the baby for just one hour, one afternoon, while Marie and Osborn came to take fashionable tea with her at the boarding-house.  In the evening, when the pier was lighted and the band played, and the summer life of the place was at its giddiest, she would arrive with her comfortable smile and her knitting to sit within earshot of her sleeping grandson while his parents went out to enjoy themselves.

Marie did not know what she would have done without the wise woman upon this holiday; but when they talked together she was still shy of confidences, and still reluctant to admit any but the most modern interpretation of the married relationship.  Mrs. Amber, however, saw all there was to see and felt no resentment about it.  Things were so; and they always had been.  You might be miserable if you were married, but then you would have been far more miserable if you had not married.  She pitied all spinsters profoundly.  She was glad her daughter had found a husband and a home; and she would not have dreamed of combating Osborn.  He was that strange, wilful despotic thing, a man.  She would have handed him without contest that dangerous weapon of complete power over a woman and her children.  Mrs. Amber propitiated Osborn; she pleased and flattered him; and her judgment of him was that he was far better than he might have been.

Grannie travelled back with them to town, and she was very useful during the journey.  She kept a strict eye upon the hand-luggage and nursed the baby, while Marie and Osborn smiled together over the sketches in a humorous weekly.  Their money was all spent, and they were really half-relieved to be going back to the flat, where they need not keep up that air of being so very pleased with every detail of a rather strained holiday.  They would meet other people they knew, who had similarly enjoyed themselves, and would cry: 

“Have you been away?  We’re just back.  We went to Littlehampton and had a gorgeous time!  We had such awf’ly comfortable rooms, not actually on the front, but within a minute’s walk.  We prefer rooms to an hotel.  We enjoyed ourselves tremendously.  Where did you go?”