f and the crib.

"Martin Wade, let me pass. He's mine."

"It isn't going to hurt him to cry. He does it often enough."

"If you had a really cross baby around you'd know how good and
reasonable Billy is," she flamed, torn by the little sobs.

"You get out to that kitchen," he ordered, more openly angry than Rose
had ever seen him. "I've had enough of this talk, do you hear, and
enough of this way of doing. Don't you set foot in here again till
supper's over. I've had quite enough, too, of jumping up and down to
wait on myself."

Confusedly, Rose thought of her countless hours of lost sleep, her even
yet unrecovered strength, the enormous readjustment of her own life in
her sincere efforts to do her best by the whole household, her joyous
acceptance of all the perpetual self-denial her new duties to Billy
necessitated. In comparison, the inconveniences to which Martin had been
put seemed trifling. The occasional delays, and the unusual bother of
stepping to the stove, now and then, to pour himself and the men a hot
cup of coffee--this was their sum total. And how injured he really felt!
The injustice of it left her speechless. Nails biting into her hands
in her struggle for self-control, she left the room. With a slam of the
door behind him, Martin followed her.

Blindly she strove for reason. Billy would simply cry himself to
sleep--it was bad for his whole nervous system, but it would not
actually make him sick. What a chaos must be in that little heart! His
mother had failed him for the first time in his life. It was cruel, the
way Martin had forced her to this, and as she listened, for the next
half hour, to the muffled sound of Billy's crying and saw how impervious
to it Martin was, she knew that never again could things be the same
between her husband and herself.

But when, supper over, she found the corners of the rosebud mouth still
pathetically down and Billy's breath still quivering in long gasps, she
gathered the snuggly body to her and vowed in little broken love-words
that from now on his father should have no further opportunities for
discipline. Knowing him as she did, she should have trained the baby in
the first place to go to sleep alone, should have denied herself those
added sweet moments. After this she would be on her guard, forestall
Martin, do tenderly what he would do harshly. Never again should her boy
be made to suffer through any such mistaken selfishness of hers.

And though, after