Page:Delight - de la Roche - 1926.djvu/130

 greedily eat the toast and custard one of the girls had brought her, or play with Queenie's flaxen hair, or even curl up in a ball and shut her eyes. He felt fettered in the struggle to maintain his position.

At last definite word was received that Mr. Hodgins was to be expected on Monday at noon.

All through the quiet of Sunday Charley was in a state of portentous calm. As he was undressing that night he addressed almost the first words he had spoken that day to Mrs. Bye.

"Mr. Hodgins will be here to dinner tomorrow. Are you goin' to get up or are you goin' to lie there forever?"

"Oh," moaned Mrs. Bye, "I'm so weak. Do let me be."

"Do you want to lose us our job?"

Mrs. Bye rolled up in a ball and shut her eyes.

Charley, in his undershirt and trousers, stood looking down at her. He looked from her to Queenie, sprawled over her little mattress on the floor, her pink face in a halo of silvery hair. A deep resolve to be master in his own house was born in him. He was an Englishman. This shabby, tumbled room, littered with the belongings of three people, was his castle. These two recumbent, obstinate females were his clinging vines, and he the sturdy oak. They'd cling so hard they'd stifle him if they could. But he'd show them oak wasn't to be stifled. Oak had his rights, by gum!

He dropped his boots, truculently, one by his wife's bed, one by his daughter's. Neither flinched nor stirred. He finished his undressing, put out the light, and sank heavily into bed.

His weight caused the mattress to sink so that Mrs. Bye rolled from her eminence next the wall, down