preparation of meals, the intermittent presence of the father, the
whole gamut of its mother's unsophisticated temper. It is carried into
crowded and eventful streets at all hours. It participates in pothouse
soirees and assists at the business of shopping. It may not lead a very
hygienic life, but it does not lead a dull one. Contrast with its lot
that of the lonely child of some woman of fashion, leading its
beautifully non-bacterial life in a carefully secluded nursery under
the control of a virtuous, punctual, invariable, conscientious rather
than emotional nurse. The poor little soul wails as often for events as
the slum baby does for nourishment. Into its grey nursery there rushes
every day, or every other day, a breathless, preoccupied, excessively
dressed, cleverish, many-sided, fundamentally silly, and universally
incapable woman, vociferates a little conventional affection, slaps a
kiss or so upon her offspring, and goes off again to collect that daily
meed of admiration and cheap envy which is the gusto of her world.
After that gushing, rustling, incomprehensible passage, the child
relapses into the boring care of its bored hireling for another day.
The nurse writes her letters, mends her clothes, reads and thinks of
the natural interests of her own life, and the child is "good" just in
proportion to the extent to which it doesn't "worry."

That, of course, is an extreme case. It assumes a particularly bad
mother and a particularly ill-chosen nurse, and what is probably only a
transitory phase of sexual debasement. The average nurse of the upper-
class child is often a woman of highly developed motherly instincts,
and it is probable that our upper class and our upper middle-class is
passing or has already passed through that phase of thought which has
made solitary children so common in the last decade or so. The
effective contrast must not take us too far. We must remember that all
women do not possess the passion for nursing, and that some of those