m up again with that
peculiar motion with which people roll up sleeves. This morning, having
failed to elicit papa from the bed by persuasion, she made such a racket
about her ablutions that he lifted his dreary lids at last. He realized
that it was morning, Monday, and raining. It irritated him so that he
glared at his faithful wife with no fervor for her unsullied and
unwearied--if not altogether unwearisome--devotion. He watched her roll
up those sleeves thrice more. Somehow he wanted to scream at the
futility of it. But he checked the impulse partly, and it was with
softness that he made a comment he had choked back for years. "Serina--"
he began.

"Well," she returned, pausing with the soap clenched in one hand.

He spoke with the luxurious leisureliness and the pauses for commas of a
nearly educated man lolling too long abed:

"Serina, it has just occurred to me that, since we have been married,
you have expended, on rolling back those everlastingly relapsing sleeves
of yours, enough energy to have rolled the Sphinx of Egypt up on top of
the Pyramid of Cheops."

Serina was so surprised that she shot the slippery soap under the
wash-stand. She went right after it. There may be nymphs who can stalk a
cake of soap under a wash-stand with grace, but Serina was not one of
them. Her indolent spouse made another cynical comment:

"Don't do that! You look like the Goddess of Liberty trying to peek into
the Subway."

But she did not hear him. She was rummaging for the soap and for an
answer to his first remark. At length she emerged with both. She stood
up and panted.

"Well, I can't see as it would 'a' done me any good if I had have!"

"Had have what?" her husband yawned, having forgotten his original
remark.

"Got the Sphinnix on top of the Cheops. And besides, I've been meaning
to hem them up; but now that you've gone bankrupt again, and I have to
do my own cooking and all--"

"But, my dear Serina, you've said the same thing ever since we were
married. What frets me is to think of the terrible waste of labor with
nothing to show for it."

She sniffed, and retorted with all the superiority of the unsuccessful
wife of an unsuccessful husband:

"Well, I can't see as you're so smart. Ever since we been married you
been goin' to that stationery-store of yours, and you never learned
enough to keep from going bankrupt three times. And now they've shut
the shop, and you've nothing better to do than lay in bed an