She stopped in a career from a seething stove to a pan-covered table.
As the father and children filed in she peered at them.

"Eh, what? Been fightin' agin, by Gawd!" She threw herself
upon Jimmie. The urchin tried to dart behind the others and in the
scuffle the babe, Tommie, was knocked down. He protested with his
usual vehemence, because they had bruised his tender shins against
a table leg.

The mother's massive shoulders heaved with anger. Grasping the
urchin by the neck and shoulder she shook him until he rattled.
She dragged him to an unholy sink, and, soaking a rag in water,
began to scrub his lacerated face with it. Jimmie screamed in pain
and tried to twist his shoulders out of the clasp of the huge arms.

The babe sat on the floor watching the scene, his face in contortions
like that of a woman at a tragedy. The father, with a newly-ladened
pipe in his mouth, crouched on a backless chair near the stove.
Jimmie's cries annoyed him. He turned about and bellowed at his wife:

"Let the damned kid alone for a minute, will yeh, Mary? Yer allus
poundin' 'im. When I come nights I can't git no rest 'cause
yer allus poundin' a kid. Let up, d'yeh hear? Don't be allus
poundin' a kid."

The woman's operations on the urchin instantly increased in violence.
At last she tossed him to a corner where he limply lay cursing and weeping.

The wife put her immense hands on her hips and with a
chieftain-like stride approached her husband.