He came back with the intelligence that it was poor little Mrs. Yet, and that there was no one waiting on her.
Fortunately the next afternoon Aunt Gwendolin went to "bridge," and again donning grandmother's garments, I slipped out of the house and down to the home of Mrs. Yet.
Meeting the doctor at the door, just as he was coming out, I ordered him to engage a nurse.
He looked at me in surprise, but I paid in advance for a week's service, so he could do nothing but obey me.
Opening the door I went into the front room of the little home and found the Celestial baby fretting away in its cradle just as any other baby would fret if left to itself. I began to call it all sorts of pet names in Chinese, and the little slant-eye cooed and smiled back at me as if he really liked it.
A Chinese neighbour woman came in and told me that the baby was to be kept in the front room, while its mother was quarantined in a room upstairs. She further informed me that she came in twice a day to feed the baby, and the rest of the time he was alone.
"I have it! I have it!" I cried exultingly to my own interior self, "I know now my aptitude! I know now what I can do that is impossible to any other; it surely is impossible to any other—in this nation of an hour—to jabber the Chinese I can jabber to this eighteen months' old baby! I shall come here and take care of him, while the trained nurse is taking care of the mother upstairs. I'll come for awhile every day anyway, and will pay the Chinese woman, who cannot leave her laundry-minding in the daytime, to take care of him at night! He's just as much a dear human baby as any purple-and-fine-linen American baby!"
How fortune favoured me that evening! Aunt Gwendolin announced that she was going in the morning on a month's visit to another city.
She was not much more than out the door the following day when I asked grandmother's permission to go where I liked every afternoon of the week.
Dear grandmother remonstrated a little—for fear I might tire myself too much—or might go where it was not wise to go, etc., etc. But I coaxed, and I won the day.