Page:The White Peacock, Lawrence, 1911.djvu/152

144 “It is too bad!” she said.

“Here,” said Lettie, handing him an apple she had peeled. “You may have an apple, greedy boy.”

He took it and looked at it. Then a malicious smile twinkled round his eyes,—as he said:

“If you give me the apple, to whom will you give the peel?”

“The swine,” she said, as if she only understood his first reference to the Prodigal Son. He put the apple on the table.

“Don’t you want it?” she said.

“Mother,” he said, comically, as if jesting. “She is offering me the apple like Eve.”

Like a flash, she snatched the apple from him, hid it in her skirts a moment, looking at him with dilated eyes, and then she flung it at the fire. She missed, and the father leaned forward and picked it off the hob, saying:

“The pigs may as well have it. You were slow, George—when a lady offers you a thing you don’t have to make mouths.”

“A ce qu’il parait,” she cried, laughing now at her ease, boisterously:

“Is she making love, Emily?” asked the father, laughing suggestively.

“She says it too fast for me,” said Emily.

George was leaning back in his chair, his hands in his breeches pockets.

“We shall have to finish his raisins after all, Emily,” said Lettie brightly. “Look what a lazy animal he is.”

“He likes his comfort,” said Emily, with irony.

“The picture of content—solid, healthy,