II
Miss Nash, the baby carriage in front of her, furrowed a way through the traffic of the avenue, relatively scant in those days, and reaching the safety of the other side passed within the Park. She was a trained child's-nurse, and wore a uniform. England being at that time the only source of this specialty, examples in New York were limited to the heirs-apparent of the noble families. Between a nursemaid and a trained child's-nurse you will notice the same distinction as between a lady's maid and a princess's lady-in-waiting.
Having entered the Park, Miss Nash stopped the carriage to lift the veil protecting her charge. He was already beyond the noises and distractions of the planet in his rosy, heavenly sleep. Miss Nash smiled wistfully, because it was the only way in which she could smile at all. A superior woman by nature, she clung to that refinement which best expresses itself in something melancholic. Daughter of a solicitor's clerk and niece to a curate, she felt her status as a lady most fittingly preserved in an atmosphere delicate, subdued, and rather sad.
And yet when she looked on her little boy asleep she was no longer superior, and scarcely so much as a lady. She was only a woman enraptured before one of those babies so compact of sweetness, affection, and intelligence that they tug at the heartstrings. She was on her guard as to loving her children overmuch, since it made it so hard to give them up when the minute for doing so arrived; but with this little fellow no guard had been effective. Whether he crowed, or cried, or kicked, or snuggled in her arms to croon with her in baby tunelessness, she found him adorable. But when he was asleep, chubby, seraphic, so awesomely undefiled, she was sure that his spirit had withdrawn from her for a little while to commune with the angels.
"No," she confessed one day to her friend, Miss Etta Messenger, the only other uniformed child's nurse among her acquaintance in New York, "it won't do. I must break myself. I shall have to leave him some day. But I do envy the mother who will have him always."
"It don't pay you," Miss Messenger declared, as one who has had experience. "Anyone, I always say, can hire my services; but my affections remain my own. Now this little girl I'm with while I'm in New York, I could leave her to-morrow without a pang if—but then I've got something to leave her for."
"And what does he say to things now?" Miss Nash inquired, with selfless interest in her friend's drama.
Miss Messenger answered, judicially, "I've put it to him straight. I've told him he must simply fix a date to marry me, or give me up. As I know he simply won't give me up—you never knew a fellow so wild about a girl as he is about me...."