Mr. Bingle | Page 7

too,
and they had all been kissed and hugged and invited to come again
without fail a year from that very night.
Mr. Bingle sighed. Neither had spoken for many minutes after the
elevator door slammed behind the excited, shrill-voiced children. Mr.
Bingle always sighed exactly at this moment in his reflections, and Mrs.
Bingle always squeezed his hand fiercely and turned a pair of darkly
regretful eyes upon him.
"I am sorry, dear heart," she murmured, and then he kissed her hand
and said that it was God's will.
"It doesn't seem right, when we want them, need them so much," she
said, huskily.
And then he repeated the thing he always said on Christmas Eve: "One
of these days I am going to adopt a--er--a couple, Mary, sure as I'm
sitting here. We just can't grow old without having some of them about
us. Some day we'll find the right sort of--"
The bedroom door opened with a squeak, slowly and with considerable
caution. The gaunt, bearded face of a tall, stooping old man appeared in
the aperture; sharp, piercing eyes under thick grey eyebrows searched
the room in a swift, almost unfriendly glance.

"The infernal brats gone, Tom?" demanded Uncle Joe harshly.
Mr. and Mrs. Bingle stiffened in their chairs. The tall old man came
down to the fireplace, disgustedly kicking a stray, crumpled sheet of
tissue paper out of his path.
"Oh, they are perfect dears, Uncle Joe," protested Mrs. Bingle, trying
her best not to bristle.
"I wish you had come in for a look at 'em--" began Mr. Bingle, but the
old man cut him off with a snort of anger.
"Cussed little nuisances," he said, holding his thin hands to the blaze.
"I don't see how you can say such things about children you don't know
and can't--" began Mrs. Bingle.
He glared at her. "You can't tell me anything about children, Mary. I'm
the father of three and I know what I'm talking about. Children are the
damnedest curse on earth. You ought to thank God you haven't got
any."
CHAPTER II
RELATING TO AN ODD RELATION
Now, Mr. Joseph Hooper had excellent cause for being a sour old man,
and in a measure was to be pitied because of his attitude toward the
young of his species. He had not been well-used by his own children,
although it is no more than right to explain that they were hardly what
any one save a parent would call children when they turned against him.
At that particular period in the history of the Hooper family, the
youngest of Joseph's three children was seventeen, the oldest
twenty-two--and it so happens that the crisis came just fifteen years
prior to the opening scene in this tale. It did not actually come on
Christmas Eve, but, as a matter of record, on the 2lst of December at
about half-past three in the afternoon. At that precise instant a judge
sitting on the bench in one of the courtrooms in New York City signed

the decree divorcing Mrs. Joseph Hooper from her husband, and four
minutes later the lady walked out of the building with her son and two
daughters, all of them having deliberately turned their backs upon the
miserable defendant in the case. As all of the children were of an age to
legally choose the parent with whom they preferred to live, and as they
elected to cast off the paternal for the maternal, it readily may be seen
that Mr. Hooper was not entirely without proof that this is a cruel,
heartless, ungrateful world and filled with gall.
As a matter of fact, he had not been wholly to blame for the family
crash, notwithstanding a rather loose respect on his part for the sanctity
of the home. (It was not to be denied that he had strayed into crooked
paths and devious ways--and, to do him justice, he did not attempt to
deny it: he ventured only to EXPLAIN it.) According to his version of
the affair, the trouble began long before he took to wine and women. It
began with his wife's propensity for nagging. Being a high-spirited,
intelligent person with a mind of his own, Mr. Hooper didn't like being
nagged, and as he rather harshly attempted to put a stop to it just as
soon as it dawned upon him that he was being hen- pecked, his wife,
not to be outdone, went at it harder than ever. And that is how it all
began, and that is why I say that he was not wholly to blame. She was
very pretty and very peevish, and they lived a cat and dog life for ten
years after the birth of the last child.
Mr. Hooper took to drink and then