e
neighbourhood, for luring maids from the smaller homes. Of course Mrs.
Airedale and Mrs. Collie could afford to pay any wages at all. So now
the best he could do was to have Mrs. Spaniel, the charwoman, come up
from the village to do the washing and ironing, two days a week. The
rest of the work he undertook himself. On a clear afternoon, when the
neighbours were not looking, he would take his own shirts and things
down to the pond--putting them neatly in the bottom of the red
express-wagon, with the puppies sitting on the linen, so no one would
see. While the puppies played about and hunted for tadpoles, he would
wash his shirts himself.

His legs ached as he took his evening stroll--keeping within earshot of
the house, so as to hear any possible outcry from the nursery. He
had been on his feet all day. But he reflected that there was a real
satisfaction in his family tasks, however gruelling. Now, at last (he
said to himself), I am really a citizen, not a mere dilettante. Of
course it is arduous. No one who is not a parent realizes, for example,
the extraordinary amount of buttoning and unbuttoning necessary in
rearing children. I calculate that 50,000 buttonings are required for
each one before it reaches the age of even rudimentary independence.
With the energy so expended one might write a great novel or chisel a
statue. Never mind: these urchins must be my Works of Art. If one
were writing a novel, he could not delegate to a hired servant the
composition of laborious chapters.

So he took his responsibility gravely. This was partly due to the
christening service, perhaps, which had gone off very charmingly. It
had not been without its embarrassments. None of the neighbouring ladies
would stand as godmother, for they were secretly dubious as to the
children's origin; so he had asked good Mrs. Spaniel to act in that
capacity. She, a simple kindly creature, was much flattered, though
certainly she can have understood very little of the symbolical rite.
Gissing, filling out the form that Mr. Poodle had given him, had put
down the names of an entirely imaginary brother and sister-in-law of
his, "deceased," whom he asserted as the parents. He had been so busy
with preparations that he did not find time, before the ceremony,
to study the text of the service; and when he and Mrs. Spaniel stood
beneath the font with an armful of ribboned infancy, he was frankly
startled by the magnitude of the promises exacted from him