[V]
MAY
May 1. Baby is more bewitching every day. She is so wonderful and so lovely that I am never tired of watching her. The miracle of a baby's growth makes one stand speechless in delight and awe. When this little morsel of life, hardly as many days in the world as I have been years, coos and smiles, and stretches out those tiny rosebud fingers only big enough for a fairy, I feel like going down on my knees to the mystery of life. I do not wonder that people pray. I understand entirely the impulse to cry out to something mighty, something higher than our own strength, some sentient heart of nature somewhere; the desire to find, by leaning on the invisible, a relief from the oppressiveness of the emotions we all must feel when a sense of the greatness of life takes hold on us. If it were but possible to believe in any of the many gods that have been offered to us, how glad I should be. Father used to say that every human being really makes a deity for himself, and that the difference between believers and unbelievers is whether they can allow the church to give a name to the god a man has himself created. I cannot accept any name from authority, but the sense of some brooding power is very strong in me when I see this being growing as if out of nothing in my very hands.
When I look at baby I have so great a consciousness of the life outside of us, the life of the universe as a whole, that I am ready to agree with any one who talks of God. The trouble is that one idea of deity seems to me as true and also as inadequate as all the rest; so that in the end I am left with only my overwhelming sense of the mightiness of the mystery of existence and of the unity of all the life in the universe.
May 2. To-day we named baby. I would not do it without consulting her father, so I sent for Tom, and he came over just after breakfast. The day has been warm, and the windows were open; a soft breath of wind came in with a feeling of spring in it, and a faint hint of a summer coming by and by. I was upstairs in the nursery when Tom came; for we have made a genuine, full-fledged nursery of the south chamber, and installed Rosa and the baby there. When they told me that he was here, I took baby, all pink and sweet from her bath, and went down with her.
Tom stood with his back to the parlor door, looking out of the window. He did not hear me until I spoke, and said good-morning. Then he turned quickly. At sight of baby he changed color, and forgot to answer my greeting. He came across the room toward us, so that we met in the middle of the floor.
"Good God, Ruth!" he said. "To think of seeing you with her baby in your arms!"
The words hurt me for myself and for him.
"Tom," I cried out excitedly, "I will not hear you say anything against baby! It is neither hers nor yours now. It is mine, mine! You shall not speak of her as if she were anything but the sweetest, purest thing in the whole world!"
He looked at me so intently and so feelingly while I snuggled the pink ball up to me and kissed it, that it was rather disconcerting. To change the subject, I went straight to the point.