“You neva said so,” Mr. Lander opened his mouth almost for the first time, since the talk began.

“I didn’t suppose you’d like it,” said his wife.

“Well, she a’n’t a baby.  I guess you’d find you had your hands full, takon’ a half-grown gul like that to bring up.”

“I shouldn’t be afraid any,” the wife declared.  “She has just twined herself round my heat.  I can’t get her pretty looks out of my eyes.  I know she’s good.”

“We’ll see how you feel about it in the morning.”

The old man began to wind his watch, and his wife seemed to take this for a sign that the incident was closed, for the present at least.  He seldom talked, but there came times when he would not even listen.  One of these was the time after he had wound his watch.  A minute later he had undressed, with an agility incredible of his years, and was in bed, as effectively blind and deaf to his wife’s appeals as if he were already asleep.

II.

When Albert Gallatin Lander (he was named for an early Secretary of the Treasury as a tribute to the statesman’s financial policy) went out of business, his wife began to go out of health; and it became the most serious affair of his declining years to provide for her invalid fancies.  He would have liked to buy a place in the Boston suburbs (he preferred one of the Newtons) where they could both have had something to do, she inside of the house, and he outside; but she declared that what they both needed was a good long rest, with freedom from care and trouble of every kind.  She broke up their establishment in Boston, and stored their furniture, and she would have made him sell the simple old house in which they had always lived, on an unfashionable up-and-down-hill street of the West End, if he had not taken one of his stubborn stands, and let it for a term of years without consulting her.  But she had her way about their own movements, and they began that life of hotels, which they had now lived so long that she believed any other impossible.  Its luxury and idleness had told upon each of them with diverse effect.

They had both entered upon it in much the same corporal figure, but she had constantly grown in flesh, while he had dwindled away until he was not much more than half the weight of his prime.  Their digestion was alike impaired by their joint life, but as they took the same medicines Mrs. Lander was baffled to account for the varying result.  She was sure that all the anxiety came upon her, and that logically she was the one who ought to have wasted away.  But she had before her the spectacle of a husband who, while he gave his entire attention to her health, did not audibly or visibly worry about it, and yet had lost weight in such measure that upon trying on a pair of his old trousers taken out of storage with some clothes of her own, he found it impossible to use the side pockets which the change in his figure