sure whether this was meant to be
sarcastic or not. She answered, however, "Well! your husband will
come, at all events."

"You may be quite sure of that," said Mrs. Ferrola, with the same
quietness.

"Well!" said Mrs. Follingsbee, rising, with patronizing cheerfulness,
"delighted to see you doing so well; and, if it is pleasant, I
will send the carriage round to take you a drive in the park this
afternoon. Good-morning."

And, like a rustling cloud of silks and satins and perfumes, she bent
down and kissed the baby, and swept from the apartment.

Mrs. Ferrola, with a movement that seemed involuntary, wiped the
baby's cheek with her handkerchief, and, folding it closer to her
bosom, looked up as if asking patience where patience is to be found
for the asking.

"There! I didn't I tell you?" said Mrs. Follingsbee when she came
out; "just one of those provoking, meek, obstinate, impracticable
creatures, with no adaptation in her."

"Oh, gracious me!" said Lillie: "I can't imagine more dire despair
than to sit all day tending baby."

"Well, so you would think; and Charlie has offered to hire competent
nurses, and wants her to dress herself up and go into society; and she
just won't do it, and sticks right down by the cradle there, with her
children running over her like so many squirrels."

"Oh! I hope and trust I never shall have children," said Lillie,
fervently, "because, you see, there's an end of every thing. No more
fun, no more frolics, no more admiration or good times; nothing but
this frightful baby, that you can't get rid of."

Yet, as Lillie spoke, she knew, in her own slippery little heart, that
the shadow of this awful cloud of maternity was resting over her;
though she laced and danced, and bid defiance to every law of nature,
with a blind and ignorant wilfulness, not caring what consequences she
might draw down on herself, if only she might escape this.

And was there, then, no soft spot in this woman's heart anywhere?
Generally it is thought that the throb of the child's heart awakens a
heart in the mother, and that the mother is born again with her child.
It is so with unperverted nature, as God meant it to be; and you
shall hear from the lips of an Irish washer-woman a genuine poetry of
maternal feeling, for the little one who comes to make her toil more
toilsome, that is wholly withered away out of luxurious circles, where
there is every thing to make life easy. Just as the Chinese have
con