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There would be some cotillions, anyway, before Lent. She hoped she wasn’t going to come out of all this with her color gone. And her figure — it would be a pity if the gowns that had just come from Paris shouldn’t fit her now. She would have the boxes opened to-morrow and the gowns spread out for inspection — one of them ought to be simply exquisite — cherry-colored satin, the front embroidered with seed-pearls, cut very low, but with a high ruff, and clouds of old Venice point. Lester van Dycke always said when she wore that shade that Watteau should have painted her. Poor Lester — she couldn’t understand why there should have been any feeling about that little flirtation; he was only teaching her how to smoke a cigarette like Carmen. And then it was diverting to see just ho
w far you could go and stop. And really she had been awfully hard up when he lost that money to her at poker. Thank goodness, it was all paid back before he was sent off on that whaling voyage to break up his drinking. How people do slip in and out of your life. — What was that woman doing now? Oh, indeed — they needn’t bring that baby to her; she didn’t want him.

The nurse, a wise woman as nurses were in the days of Pharaoh, turned down the silken sheet and laid on the mother’s arm the bundle of soft wool and filmy lace, baring the little pink face. "I never supposed babies looked like that. Isn’t he comical? And you needn’t think I’m going to nurse him," she meant to say aloud, but really said only to herself. "He can be brought up by hand; or you may get all the foster-mothers you please. I won’t be tied down by a chain two or three hours long, and grow a fright into the bargain!"

"We can’t let the little man starve," the nurse was saying. "At any rate, just for the present," she urged. "Till the doctor comes again and we can get just what is wanted. "

Were all nurses like this? Wasn’t she compelling? A sort of civilized She. Well, if she must. But not to keep it up. How absurd! How perfectly ridiculous! But they were not to think she was going on with it and forego the races and the yachting and everything else. "Don’t you know," she said in her thoughts to the baby, "that you’re dreadfully in my way?"

The baby smiled — the vacuous little grimace of a baby — and opened his eyes. "Dear me," she said. "How interesting! Do you imagine he sees me? Fancy! And look at the fingers — aren’t they quite perfect? And his eyes — why, they’re really — just look at the little fine corners! Do you suppose he knows I’m his mother? Oh, I am his mother!" And the little head had snuggled into place. She gazed at him in a bewildered wonder: something seemed to be taking hold of her very heart-strings. Oh, this scrap of a creature was part of her life itself! She had made him! She had struck this spark of a soul into a being! The idea! But why? The dear person had a soul, of course. And she fell to wondering what kind of soul it was. What kind of a soul — why, didn’t people say the son was the avatar of the mother? A soul like hers, to be sure. My gracious, what kind of a soul was hers?

It seemed suddenly to be growing black everywhere about her, whether owing to the new sensations and to exhaustion, or to the too illuminating thought. All along the dusky wall she saw written in letters of flame, Mene, mene, tekel upharsin. She half laughed to think it should be in plain, every-day characters instead of Persian script. Thou art weighed in the balance — and found wanting.