d to say to him.

"What is it?" he repeated. "What has frightened you?"

He, too, was frightened, and perspiration came starting through the tan.
For it is a serious thing to have been watched. We all radiate something
curiously intimate when we believe ourselves to be alone.

"Business--" she said at last.

"Business with me?"

"Most important business." She was lying, white and limp, in the dusty
chair.

"Before business you must get well; this is the best wine."

She refused it feebly. He poured out a glass. She drank it. As she did
so she became self-conscious. However important the business, it was not
proper of her to have called on him, or to accept his hospitality.

"Perhaps you are engaged," she said. "And as I am not very well--"

"You are not well enough to go back. And I am not engaged."

She looked nervously at the other room.

"Ah, now I understand," he exclaimed. "Now I see what frightened you.
But why did you never speak?" And taking her into the room where he
lived, he pointed to--the baby.

She had thought so much about this baby, of its welfare, its soul, its
morals, its probable defects. But, like most unmarried people, she had
only thought of it as a word--just as the healthy man only thinks of the
word death, not of death itself. The real thing, lying asleep on a dirty
rug, disconcerted her. It did not stand for a principle any longer.
It was so much flesh and blood, so many inches and ounces of life--a
glorious, unquestionable fact, which a man and another woman had given
to the world. You could talk to it; in time it would answer you; in time
it would not answer you unless it chose, but would secrete, within the
compass of its body, thoughts and wonderful passions of its own. And
this was the machine on which she and Mrs. Herriton and Philip and
Harriet had for the last month been exercising their various ideals--had
determined that in time it should move this way or that way, should
accomplish this and not that. It was to be Low Church, it was to be
high-principled, it was to be tactful, gentlemanly, artistic--excellent
things all. Yet now that she saw this baby, lying asleep on a dirty rug,
she had a great disposition not to dictate one of them, and to exert
no more influence than there may be in a kiss or in the vaguest of the
heartfelt prayers.

But she had practised self-discipline, and her thoughts and actions were
not yet to correspond. To recover her self-esteem she tried t