“To cure me of a what-you-call-it problem?”

“Yes,” said I, emphatically.

“Hou!” laughed Carlotta in a superior way, “physic can’t cure that.”

“You are relying on an exploded fallacy immortalised in a hackneyed Shakespearian quotation,” I remarked.

“Go on,” said Carlotta, encouragingly.

“What do you mean?” I asked, taken aback.

“Oh, you darling Seer Marcous,” cried Carlotta.  “It is so lovely to hear you talk!”

So I went on talking, and the distress occasioned by the “Scarlet
Letter” was forgotten.

I have mentioned Carlotta’s needlework.  This was undertaken at the sapient instigation of Antoinette, who in her turn, I am sure, neglected the ladle for the scissors, and cast many of her duties upon the silent but sympathetic Stenson.  Carlotta herself delighted in these preparations.  She was never happier than when curled up on the sofa, a box of chocolates by her side, her work-basket frothing over, like a great dish of oeufs a la neige, with lawn or mull or what-not, and (I verily believe to complete her content) my ungainly figure and hatchet-face within her purview.  She would eat and sew industriously.  Sometimes she would press too hard on a sweetmeat and with a little cry would hold up a sticky finger and thumb.

“Look,” she would say, puckering up her face.

And to save from soilure the dainty fabric she was working at, I would rise and wipe her fingers with my handkerchief; whereupon she would coo out the sweetest “thank you,” in the world, and perhaps hold up a diminutive garment.

“Isn’t it pretty?”

“Yes, my dear,” I would say, and I would turn aside wondering at the exquisite refinements of pain that men were sometimes called upon to bear.

At last the time came.  I sat up all night in a torture of suspense, having got it into my foolish head that Carlotta might die.  The doctor came upon me at six in the morning sitting half frozen at the bottom of the stairs.  When he gave me his cheery news he seemed to develop from a middle-aged, commonplace man into a radiant archangel.

I met Antoinette soon afterwards, busy, important, exultant.  She nevertheless graciously accorded me a brief interview.

“And to think, Monsieur,” she exclaimed, as if the crowning triumph of a million ions of evolution had at, last been attained, “to think that it is a boy!”

“You would have been just as pleased if it had been a girl,” said I.

She shook her wise, fat head.  “Women ca ne vaut pas grand’ chose.”

Let it be remembered that “women are of no great account” is a sentiment expressed, not by me, but by Antoinette.  But all the same I soon found myself a cipher in the house, where the triumvirate of the negligible sex, Antoinette, the nurse and Carlotta, reigned despotically.

To write much of Carlotta’s happiness would be to treat of sacred things at which I can only guess.  She dwelt in rapture.  The joy and meaning of the universe were concentrated in the tiny bundle of pink flesh that lay on her bosom.  I used to sit by her side while she talked unwearyingly of him.  He was a thing of infinite perfections.  He had such a lot of hair.