hemming.

Unmoved among them the baby beat methodically on his mother's breast
with his rubber ring, as indifferent to her sobs as to the intermittent
tearful "coos" of his grandmother. He had a smooth bald head, fringed,
like the head of a very old man, with pale silken hair that was almost
white in the sunshine, and his eyes, as expressionless as marbles,
stared over the pot of hyacinths at a sparrow perched against the deep
blue sky on the red brick wall of the opposite house. From beneath his
starched little skirt his feet, in pink crocheted shoes, protruded with
a forlorn and helpless air as if they hardly belonged to him.

"Oh, my poor child, what are we going to do?" asked Mrs. Carr in a
resigned voice as she returned to her hemming.

"There's nothing to do, mother," answered Jane, without lifting her eyes
from the baby's head, without moving an inch out of the position she had
dropped into when she entered the room. Then, after a sobbing pause, she
defined in a classic formula her whole philosophy of life: "It wasn't my
fault," she said.

"But one can always do something if it's only to scream," rejoined
Gabriella with spirit.

"I wouldn't scream," replied Jane, while the pale cast of resolution
hardened her small flat features, "not--not if he killed me. My one
comfort," she added pathetically, "is that only you and mother know how
he treats me."

Her pretty vacant face with its faded bloom resembled a pastel portrait