"It depends," said Miss Batchelor, a little maliciously. (Really, the

woman was impossible, and such a hopeless fool!) Miss Batchelor's

habitually nervous manner made her innuendoes doubly telling when they

came.

"Well--he's very small. Just feel how small he is."

Instinctively Miss Batchelor held out her hands for the child, and in

another moment he was lying across her arms, slobbering dreamily.

He was not quiet long. He stretched himself, he writhed, he made himself

limp, he made himself stiff, he threw himself backwards recklessly; and

still Miss Batchelor held him. And when he cried she held him all the

closer. She let him explore the front of her dress with his little wet

mouth and fingers. He had made a great many futile experiments of the

kind in the last two days. Of those three worlds that were his, the world

of light, the world of sleep, and the world of his mother's breast, they

had taken away the one that he liked best--the warm living world of which

he had been lord and master, that was flesh of his flesh, given to his

hands to hold, and obedient to the pressure of his lips. Since then he

had lived from feeble hope to hope; and now, when he struck upon that

hard and narrow tract of corduroy studded with comfortless buttons, he

began again his melancholy wail.

"Poor little beggar," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson, "he can't help it. He's

being weaned. Don't let him slobber over your nice dress."

Certainly he had not improved the corduroy, but Miss Batchelor did not

seem to resent it.

"Can't you nurse him?" she asked.

"No," said Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

"I don't believe it," said Miss Batchelor to herself. "She isn't that

sort. It's the clever, nervous, modern women who can't nurse their

children--it all runs to brains. But these little animals! If ever there

was a woman born to suckle fools, it's Mrs. Nevill Tyson. She's got the

physique, the temperament, everything. And she can give her whole mind to

it."

"What a pity," she said aloud, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson laughed.

"I don't want to nurse him; why should I?" said she. She lay back in

her attitude of indifference, watching her son, and watched by Miss

Batchelor's sharp eyes and heartless brain.

Heartless? Well, I can't say. Not altogether, perhaps. Goodness knows

what went on in the heart of that extraordinary woman, condemned by her

own cleverness to perpetual maidenhood.

"How very odd," said she to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

To herself she said, "I thought so. It's not that she can't. She

won't--selfish little thing. And yet--she isn't the kind that

abominates babies, as such. Therefore if she doesn't care for this

small thing, that is because it's her husband's child."

To do Miss Batchelor justice, she was appalled by her own logic. Was it

the logic of the heart or of the brain? She did not stop to think. Having

convinced herself that her argument was a chain of adamant, she caught

herself leaning on it for support, with the surprising result that she

found it easier to be kind to Mrs. Nevill Tyson (a woman who presumably

did not love her husband) when she took her leave.




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