Laurence said that the baby was stupid.
"Of course he can't know you! He's only four months old!" Mrs. Farley defended indignantly.
Laurence sentimentalized his mother's devotion to the baby, but that did not alter his own reaction. The child made no appeal to him. He gave it back to the grandmother. He did not want it near him for long at a time.
Occasionally when he leaned over the carriage and let its fingers stray through his stiff, gray-sprinkled hair, he lost himself in the feeble touch of its hands. It knew nothing. It did not care. It was almost as if it loved him without knowing him, and somehow he wanted to be loved like that. It relieved him of himself.
"Eh, you little beggar!" he would exclaim, floundering with the foolish word, and he would shake its clutching finger roughly.
As the baby stared at him, it made a happy sound. Its soul, sweet and a little blank, lay on the surface of its eyes, and there was something awesome in its stupid naked little looks, among the grown people who had forgotten how to be naked like that even with themselves.
Laurence flushed and his eyes dimmed with emotion. The softness and helplessness of the baby took his male self. He wanted to do something for it. He could not even buy it a sweet.
"Poor little thing! Poor little thing!" he murmured to himself. However, the definiteness of his responsibility toward it was a relief to him in the unsettled state of his life.
It was five months after Winnie's death before Laurence began frankly to consider his freedom and what he should do with it. It came over him suddenly and he knew that he must have been thinking of it before without having realized it.