Amenda was always most respectful in her manner.

But she had a knack of making Ethelbertha and myself feel that we were a couple of children, playing at being grown up and married, and that she was humouring us.
Amenda stayed with us for nearly five years--until the milkman, having saved up sufficient to buy a "walk" of his own, had become practicable--but her attitude towards us never changed.

Even when we came to be really important married people, the proprietors of a "family," it was evident that she merely considered we had gone a step further in the game, and were playing now at being fathers and mothers.
By some subtle process she contrived to imbue the baby also with this idea.

The child never seemed to me to take either of us quite seriously.
She would play with us, or join with us in light conversation; but when it came to the serious affairs of life, such as bathing or feeding, she preferred her nurse.
Ethelbertha attempted to take her out in the perambulator one morning, but the child would not hear of it for a moment.
"It's all right, baby dear," explained Ethelbertha soothingly.

"Baby's going out with mamma this morning." "Oh no, baby ain't," was baby's rejoinder, in effect if not in words.
"Baby don't take a hand in experiments--not this baby.