"Why wouldn't Dicky have his wife and the baby out?
Surely he had a salary--a fine salary--and it was too bad of him to
enjoy himself in India. But would he--could he--make the next draft
a little more elastic?" Here followed a list of baby's kit, as long
as a Parsee's bill. Then Dicky, whose heart yearned to his wife and
the little son he had never seen--which, again, is a feeling no boy
is entitled to--enlarged the draft and wrote queer half-boy, half-
man letters, saying that life was not so enjoyable after all and
would the little wife wait yet a little longer? But the little
wife, however much she approved of money, objected to waiting, and
there was a strange, hard sort of ring in her letters that Dicky
didn't understand. How could he, poor boy?
Later on still--just as Dicky had been told--apropos of another
youngster who had "made a fool of himself," as the saying is--that
matrimony would not only ruin his further chances of advancement,
but would lose him his present appointment--came the news that the
baby, his own little, little son, had died, and, behind this, forty
lines of an angry woman's scrawl, saying that death might have been
averted if certain things, all costing money, had been done, or if
the mother and the baby had been with Dicky.
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