ed any further step for its
disposition. She could not well drop it on the stone again, and there
was no one to whom she could give it. Realizing with a sudden sense of
outrage that she was affording amusement to the well-trained servants
of her Cornelia associates, she retreated into the building and into the
hall with the screaming Gracchus in her arms.

Her advent and the clamor of her burden interrupted the reading of a
paper upon "Nursery Emergencies, and How to Meet Them," by a young lady
who had exhausted the family physician, and such books as he could be
persuaded to lend her. Her remarks, though interesting and
authoritative, could not prevail against the howling presence of a real
nursery emergency, and the attention of the audience stampeded to Mrs.
Ponsonby-Brown and her contribution to the meeting. That practised and
disgusted philanthropist relinquished the youngest Rashnowsky to the
first pair of pitying arms extended in its direction. But pity was not
what the sufferer craved, and she repudiated it eloquently.

"What shall I do with it?" cried this young Cornelia, looking helplessly
around upon her fellows. "Whenever my Jimmie behaved like this I used
simply to ring for Louise. I never knew what she used to do with him."

Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown snorted. "A nurse!" said she, "a hireling! You
relegate a mother's sacred responsibilities to a servant." Mrs.
Ponsonby-Brown had never enjoyed these responsibilities, and so was
eloquent and authoritative upon them.

Other Cornelias fluttered about suggesting that the Gracchus was
suffering from hunger, colic, or misdirected pins. The expert upon
emergencies snatched this one from its embarrassed guardian, inverted it
across her knee, and patted it manfully upon the back. The dirtiness of
it, the thinness, the squalled wrappings, and the blue little hands and
feet touched and quickened the Cornelias as no lecture could have done,
and the resourceful vice-president found cause to congratulate herself
on the _milieu_ of the meeting.

"If we knew," said a bespectacled Cornelia sensibly and practically,
"what food they were giving it, we could easily send out and get a meal
for it."

"It hardly looks," interrupted another, "like the Mellin's Food and
Nestle's Milk Babies one sees in the advertisements."

"And yet," said the practical member, "we can't do anything until we
know what it's accustomed to. With so young a child----"

Here the door opened and an une