I would often say to her: "Why can't you let Pomona attend to it?
You surely need not give up your whole time and your whole mind to
the child."
But she would always answer that Pomona had a great many things to
do, and that she couldn't, at all times, attend to the baby.
Suppose, for instance, that she should be at the barn.
I once suggested that a nurse should be procured, but at this she
laughed.
"There is very little to do," she said, "and I really like to do
it."
"Yes," said I, "but you spend so much of your time in thinking how
glad you will be to do that little, when it is to be done, that you
can't give me any attention, at all."
"Now you have no cause to say that," she exclaimed. "You know very
well--, there!" and away she ran. It had just begun to cry!
Naturally, I was getting tired of this. I could never begin a
sentence and feel sure that I would be allowed to finish it.
Nothing was important enough to delay attention to an infantile
whimper.
Jonas, too, was in a state of unrest. He was obliged to wear his
good clothes, a great part of the time, for he was continually
going on errands to the village, and these errands were so
important that they took precedence of everything else. It gave me
a melancholy sort of pleasure, sometimes, to do Jonas's work when
he was thus sent away.
I asked him, one day, how he liked it all?
"Well," said he, reflectively, "I can't say as I understand it,
exactly. It does seem queer to me that such a little thing should
take up pretty nigh all the time of three people.
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