Dear grandmother has never seen me either leave or return to the house, but necessarily Yick and Betty are both into the secret.
"'For ways that are dark and tricks that are vain,' commend me to the Chinese."
May 22d, 1——
A most impressive occurrence has transpired, as Mrs. Paton would say. Just as I was coming out of Mrs. Yet's house this afternoon who should be passing but Professor Ballington!
I had not yet dropped my black chiffon veil, and glancing down from his great height of six feet, he looked me full in the face.
At the same instant he saw the word, "Diphtheria," in the great black letters on a scarlet ground, and stopping he exclaimed:
"Why, Miss Pearl! This is a surprise! Do you know where you are—what risk you are running? Diphtheria is contagious—very!"
"I know," I replied, "but some one has to mind a little Chinese baby in there. Its father is in the hospital, and its mother is shut in a room upstairs with diphtheria, and there is no one to stay all afternoon with the baby if I do not. He's a Chinese baby, and of no account in America," I added. (I came within one of telling him that I was the only one who could call him pet names in the language he could understand; wouldn't Aunt Gwendolin have taken a fit?) "I just had to come," I pleaded, seeing his look of disapproval. "Each man and woman is born with an aptitude to do something impossible to any other, an aptitude that the world has no match for, Mrs. Paton says; and I have just found out that my aptitude, impossible to any other, is to mind this Chinese baby; no one else can match me in this!"
He looked less severe, almost kind, and half as if he could scarcely keep from laughing. Then he said, "Have you disinfectants? They are very necessary."