e Baby knew it; and
the two of them simply rode roughshod over Ranny and his remonstrances.

"What are you doing there, Winky?" he would say, when he caught her on a
Sunday morning in the bathroom, with Baby happy on a blanket at her
feet.

"Washing Dossie's pinafores," she would sing out.

"I wish to Goodness I could stop you."

"But you can't. Can he, Lamby Lamb? Laugh at him, then. Laugh at Daddy."

And the Lamby Lamb would laugh.

He knew, and they knew, that he couldn't stop her except by doing the
work for her; and the more things he did the more things she found to do
that he couldn't do, such as washing pinafores. So he gave it up; and
gradually he too began to take it for granted that Winny should be
there.

And she was more than ever there after April of nineteen-seven, when the
little son was born. The little son that they called Stanley Fulleymore.

When _he_ came more and more of Ranny's savings had to go. He didn't
care. For he had gone again through deep anguish, again believing that
Violet would die, that she couldn't possibly get over it. And she _had_
got over it; beautifully, the doctor said. He assured him that she
hadn't turned a hair. And after it she bloomed as she had never bloomed
before; she bloomed to excess; she coarsened in sheer exuberance and
rioting of health. She was built magnificently, built as they don't seem
able to build women now, built for maternity.

"You don't think," said Ranny to the doctor, "that it really does her
any harm?"

For she had tried to frighten him with the harm she said it did her.

"My dear Ransome, if she had a dozen children it wouldn't do her any
harm."

It was the same tale as before, and he couldn't understand it. For of
the flame of maternity, the flame that burned in Winny, it was evident
that Violet hadn't got a spark. If she had been indifferent to her
daughter Dorothy, she positively hated her son, Stanley Fulleymore. She
intimated that he was a calamity, and an ugly one at that. One kid, she
said, was bad enough; what did he expect that she should do with two?

She did nothing; which was what he had expected. She trailed about the
house, glooming; she sank supine under her burden and lay forever on the
sofa. When he tried to rouse her she burst into fury and collapsed in
stupor. The furies and the stupors were worse than he had ever known.
They would have been unendurable if it had not been for Winny.

And in the long days when Winny