Mechanically he bent down and smoothed a tickly lock of hair away from the little girl’s eyelids.
“And the child is the living physical image of her,” he stammered--“the violent hair, the ghost-white skin, the facile mouth, the arrogant eyes, staring, staring, maddeningly reproachful, persistently accusing. My own stubborn will, my own hideous temper, all my own ill-favored mannerisms, mock back at me eternally in her mother’s unloved features.” As mirthless as the grin of a skull, the Senior Surgeon’s mouth twisted up a little at one corner. “Maybe I could have borne it better if she’d been a boy,” he acknowledged grimly; “but to see all your virile--masculine vices come back at you, so sissified, in _skirts_!”
With an unmistakable gasp of relief, the Senior Surgeon expanded his great chest.
“There, that’s done,” he said tersely. “So much for the past; now for the present! Look at us pretty keenly and judge for yourself. A man and a very little girl, not guaranteed, not even recommended, offered merely ‘as is,’ in the honest trade-phrase of the day, offered frankly in an open package, accepted frankly, if at all, ‘at your own risk.’ Not for an instant would I try to deceive you about us. Look at us closely, I ask, and decide for yourself. I am forty-eight years old; I am inexcusably bad-tempered, very quick to anger, and not, I fear, of great mercy. I am moody, I am selfish, I am most distinctly unsocial; but I am not, I believe, stingy, or ever intentionally unfair. My child is a cripple, and equally bad-tempered as myself. No one but a mercenary has ever coped with her, and she shows it. We have lived alone for six years. All of our clothes, and most of our ways, need mending. I am not one to mince matters, Miss Malgregor, nor has your training, I trust, made you one from whom truths must be veiled. I am a man, with all a man’s needs, mental, moral, physical. My child is a child with all a child’s needs, mental, moral, physical. Our house of life is full of cobwebs. The rooms of affection have long been closed. There will be a great deal of work to do, and it is not my intention, you see, that you should misunderstand in any conceivable way either the exact nature or the exact amount of work and worry involved. I should not want you to come to me afterward with a whine, as other workers do, and say: ‘Oh, but I didn’t know you would expect me to do _this_! Oh, but I hadn’t any idea you would want me to do _that_! And I certainly don’t see why you should expect me to give up my Thursday afternoon just because you yourself happened to fall down-stairs in the morning and break your back!’”