Josephine's stricture concerning
the lack of joyousness in my apparel, however, brought me up standing,
as the phrase is, and served not merely to spur me to action, but to
crystallize a tissue of reflections which had been churning in my brain
during a considerable period. One evening a fortnight later I
sauntered into the drawing-room, where my wife and four children were
congregated round the family lamps, and drew attention to my appearance
by a timorous cough.
Josephine was the first to look up. My foot-fall will usually draw
from her a welcoming smile, but she happened to be absorbed at the
moment in the end of a novel, the beginning of which she was going to
read later, so that it was not until I coughed that she raised her eyes
from her book. For a moment she stared at me as though she were
doubtful whether I was not one of the characters in whose vicissitudes
she had been engrossed, then, letting the volume fall to the ground,
she exclaimed in a voice of rapture, "Children, look at your father!"
Roused from their respective volumes by the ardor of this exhortation,
my two sons and two daughters bent their critical eyes upon the male
author of their being. It was a moment of sweet triumph for the old
man for which he had made the most careful preparations.
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