V

"So you're going home to your own people for the week end, Peggy?--And
how many of you are there,--I always forget?" said young Mrs. George
Crawford, negligently. She tipped back in her chair, half shut her
novel, half shut her eyes, and looked critically at her finger-nails.

Outside the big country house summer sunshine flooded the smooth
lawns, sparkled on the falling diamonds and still pool of the
fountain, glowed over acres of matchless wood and garden. But deep
awnings made a clear cool shade indoors, and the wide rooms were
delightfully breezy.

Margaret, busy with a ledger and cheque-book, smiled absently,
finished a long column, made an orderly entry, and wiped her pen.

"Seven," said she, smiling.

"Seven!" echoed Mrs. Potter, lazily. "My heaven--seven children!
How early Victorian!"

"Isn't it?" said a third woman, a very beautiful woman, Mrs. Watts
Watson, who was also idling and reading in the white-and-gray
morning room. "Well," she added, dropping her magazine, and locking
her hands about her head, "my grandmother had ten. Fancy trying
to raise ten children!"

"Oh, everything's different now," the first speaker said indifferently.
"Everything's more expensive, life is more complicated. People used
to have roomier houses, aunts and cousins and grandmothers living with
them; there was always some one at home with the children. Nowadays
we don't do that."

"And thank the saints we don't!" said Mrs. Watson, piously. "If
there's one thing I can't stand, it's a houseful of things-in-law!"

"Of course; but I mean it made the family problem simpler," Mrs.
Crawford pursued. "Oh--and I don't know! Everything was so simple. All
this business of sterilizing, and fumigating, and pasteurizing, and
vaccinating, and boiling in boracic acid wasn't done in those days,"
she finished vaguely.

"Now there you are--now there you are!" said Mrs. Carr-Boldt, entering
into the conversation with sudden force. Entirely recovered after her
nervous collapse, as brisk as ever in her crisp linen gown, she was
signing the cheques that Margaret handed her, frowningly busy and
absorbed with her accounts. Now she leaned back in her chair, glanced
at the watch at her wrist, and relaxed the cramped muscles of her
body. "That's exactly it, Rose," said she to Mrs. Crawford. "Life is
more complicated. People--the very people who ought to have
children--simply cannot afford it! And who's to blame? Can you blame a
woman whose lif