"But baby is so young"—
"This is no laughing matter," she interrupted with asperity, "even if the child is young. I must do my duty to her from the very beginning. Of course it will be a cross for me, but I hope I shall bear it like a Christian."
Something in her voice and manner exasperated me almost beyond endurance. I could not help remembering the day Mrs. Webbe came to the Brownrig house, and I am much afraid I was anything but conciliatory in my tone when I answered.
"Mrs. Webbe," I said to her, "if you cared for baby, and wanted to love her, I might perhaps think of giving her up, though I am very fond of her, dear little thing."
Mrs. Webbe's keen black eyes snapped at me.
"I dare say you look at it in that way," she retorted. "That's just it. It's just the sort of worldliness that would ruin the child. It's come into the world with sin and shame enough to bear, and you'd never help it to grace to bear it."
The words were not entirely clear, yet I had little doubt of their meaning. The baby, however, was after all her own flesh and blood, and I was secretly glad that to strengthen me in my resolve to keep Thomasine I had my promise to the dead mother and to Tom.
"But, Mrs. Webbe," I said as gently as I could, "don't you think the fact that baby has no mother, and must bear that, will make her need love more?"
"She'll need bracing up," was the emphatic rejoinder, "and that's just what she won't get here. I don't want her. It's a cross for me to look at her, and realize we've got to own a brat with Brownrig blood in her. I'm only trying to do my duty. Where's that baby going to get any religious training from you, Ruth Privet?"
I sat quiet a moment, thinking what I had better say. Mrs. Webbe was entirely conscientious about it all. She did not, I was sure, want baby, and she was sincere in saying that she was only trying to do her duty. When I thought of Thomasine, however, as being made to serve as a living and visible cross for the good of Mrs. Webbe's soul, I could not bear it. Driven by that strong will over the thorny paths of her grandmother's theology, poor baby would be more likely to be brought to despair than to glory. It was of course right for Mrs. Webbe to wish to take baby, but it could not be right for me to permit her to do so. If my duty clashed with hers, I could not change on that account; but I wished to be as conciliatory as possible.