back gracefully in a reclining-chair, with her hair carefully
dressed. The nurse held the baby: a squirming little bundle of soft,
embroidered flannel. The nurse was French, and she awed Maria, for
she spoke no English, and nobody except Ida could understand her. She
was elderly, small, and of a damaged blond type. Maria approached Ida
and kissed her. Ida looked at her, smiling. Then she asked if she had
had a pleasant summer. She told the nurse, in French, to show the
baby to her. Maria approached the nurse timidly. The flannel was
carefully laid aside, and the small, piteously inquiring and puzzled
face, the inquiry and the bewilderment expressed by a thousand
wrinkles, was exposed. Maria looked at it with a sort of shiver. The
nurse laid the flannel apart and disclosed the tiny feet seeming
already to kick feebly at existence. The nurse said something in
French which Maria could not understand. Ida answered also in French.
Then the baby seemed to experience a convulsion; its whole face
seemed to open into one gape of expostulation at fate. Then its
feeble, futile wail filled the whole room.

"Isn't she a little darling?" asked Ida, of Maria.

"Yes'm," replied Maria.

There was a curious air of aloofness about Ida with regard to her
baby, and something which gave the impression of wistfulness. It is
possible that she was capable of wishing that she had not that
aloofness. It did not in the least seem to Maria as if it were Ida's
baby. She had a vague impression, derived she could not tell in what
manner, of a rosebud laid on a gatepost. Ida did not seem conscious
of her baby with the woodeny consciousness of an apple-tree of a
blossom. When she gazed at it, it was with the same set smile with