"That would settle everything, settle it right," she reflected, with youth's morbid fondness for finalities.
When it was all over and she came out from under the opiate, she lay for a while, open-eyed but unseeing, too inert to grope for the lost thread of memory. She felt a stirring in the bed beside her, the movement of some living thing. She looked and there, squeezed into the edge of the pillow was a miniature head of a little old man—wrinkled, copperish. Yet the face was fat—ludicrously fat. A painfully homely face with tears running from the closed eyes, with an open mouth that driveled and drooled.
"What is it?" she thought, looking with faint curiosity. "And why is it here?"
Two small fists now rose aimlessly in the air above the face and flapped about; and a very tempest of noise issued from the sagging mouth.
"A baby," she reflected. Then memory came—"MY baby!"
She put her finger in the way of the wandering fists. First one of them, then the other, awkwardly unclosed and as awkwardly closed upon it. She smiled. The grip tightened and tightened and tightened until she wondered how hands so small and new could cling so close and hard. Then that electric clasp suddenly tightened about her heart. She burst into tears and drew the child against her breast. The pulse of its current of life was beating against her own—and she felt it. She sobbed, laughed softly, sobbed again.
Her mother was bending anxiously over her.
"What's the matter, dearest?" she asked. "What do you wish?"
"Nothing!" Pauline was smiling through her tears. "Oh, mother, I am SO happy!" she murmured.
And her happiness lasted with not a break, with hardly a pause, all that spring and all that summer—or, so long as her baby's helplessness absorbed the whole of her time and thought.