Their Child

“THERE he comes with Dora! I am so glad. I wanted you to see him so much—all of you.”

The company gathered in the drawing-room smiled sympathetically at the mother’s pride. They craned their necks about the window to get sight of the small boy. He was a white speck in the long green lawn.

“Comes rather reluctantly,” observed Dr. Vessinger, with a touch of irony. “Doesn’t seem to have his mother’s taste for society!”

“The little dear! How cunning! A perfect dear!” the women exclaimed with more or less animation.

“Why, he is in such a temper! Little Oscar! What is the matter with little Oscar?”

The child’s screams could be heard plainly, coming upward from the lawn, in shrill bursts of infantile passion. Mrs. Simmons was troubled with a mother’s confusion and distress. The nurse was holding little Oscar at arm’s length, for safety, while the child circled about her, kicking and thrusting with legs and arms. Mrs. Simmons stepped through the open window to the terrace and called:

“Oscar! Oscar!” But neither nurse nor child paid any attention to her.

“He is occupied with a greater passion,” the doctor laughed.

“Unconscious little animals, children,” observed one of the women.

“He has temperament—”

“His mother’s?” another woman suggested slyly. She was large, very blonde, very well preserved, and was known by her intimates as “the Magnificent Wreck.”

The shrill cries penetrated at last even the room beyond the large drawing-room where the people were gathered, and aroused the father, who had been called on a matter of business into the study. He stepped briskly into the room,—a handsome man of forty, with black curling hair and crisp black beard cut to a point. His cheek-bones were high, and the skin of his upper face was ruddy, as from much living in the open air.