the second
night after the boy was born.

Her frown was petulant.

"Catie!" she echoed. "Why can't you call me Katharine, Scott? It is so
much more dignified than that old baby name. I'd meant to call our baby
by it, really call her by it, not by some uncouth nickname. Yes. I know
I was baptised Catie; but so you were baptised Walter. We both of us,
you see, have something to forget. Any way, I am determined to save the
baby so much, so I want to take plenty of time to choose a good name
for him. There's no hurry, for the present." She was silent, for a
moment. Then she added, with rare tact, "I do so hope that, in course
of time, he will improve a little in his looks. Nurse says that now he
is just the image of you. No, nurse. I don't believe I want him in
here. Really, he does make the bed very warm."

Indeed, from the first hour of his advent, that was her attitude
towards the baby boy. As a piece of her own property, she tolerated
him; she assumed it, as a matter of course, that in herself alone
should be vested all rights of dictatorship over him. But when, in any
way, he interfered with her personal comfort, she handed him over to
the safe keeping of his nurse. And the nurse received him with a
gratitude unblunted by her forty years' experience of similar babies.
She coddled him, and dandled him, and rubbed his little backbone, and
whispered into his disregarding ears over and over again that he was a
itty-bitty puffic' fibbous, whatever that mamma of his might think
about it. He was a puffic' fibbous; and she knew.

Despite what seemed to Brenton the exceeding ugliness of his small son,
he took an infinite delight in his society. From the first day on, he
persecuted the nurse with inquiries as to the child's condition,
persecuted her, too, with insistent offers of help in administering to
the baby needs. By the half-hour at a time, the rector of Saint
Peter's, leaving his parish in the hands of the new curate whose advent
had been simultaneous with that of the baby boy, hung above the frilly
basket in which his small son either lay in a placid doze, or else
contorted himself and shrieked discordantly.

It was a great day for Brenton, a red-letter day, when first the child
was laid across his blanket-covered knees, while the nurse stood by,
uttering many cautions and forcibly adjusting the angles of the
clerical elbows, the better to support their tiny burden. Then she
backed off, and stood gazing down upon