“Hallo, Mother Joan! Don’t break that baby! Aren’t you holding her carelessly?” Kit demanded, shaking Joan’s hand and looking anxiously at Barbara, held under her young mother’s left arm, her head in front sticking up like a turtle’s, her heels kicking hard and fast on Joan’s waist at the back.
“Can’t you trust me with her, Kit? I’m glad that you recognize how precious she is, but, honestly, I like her myself and don’t want to damage her,” laughed Joan, bringing her daughter right side up into her arms and kissing her fat neck till the baby choked herself with giggles.
“Say, Joan, there’s something I want to be told. Set it down to my scientific bent: investigation of socialism, or economics, or anything statistical you please, but I do want to learn something: Does that baby ever tire you?” Kit asked his question hesitantly.
“I should say she does, half to pieces,” said Joan, promptly. “I’m sometimes tempted to try ether on her at night! You know those verses of Mrs. Kilmer’s about keeping her children asleep? Maybe I don’t say them!” Joan kissed Barbara again to punctuate her confession.
“But you don’t tire of her the way I mean, do you?” persisted Kit. “You don’t ever feel as if she weren’t quite worth while, as if you’d rather be free from the bother——”
“Christopher Carrington,” Joan sternly interrupted him, “one more word and I’ll call the police and commit you as a dangerous ogre, not fit to be at large. What in all this world makes you ask me that? As though any woman worth her salt would feel that way to a little child, even if it weren’t her own! And when it is——” Joan could end this sentence only with more violent kisses in the neck and all over the face of the ecstatically squirming Barbara. “Why, I only wish she were twins or triplets! I’d like a houseful of the darlings, all sizes, sorts, and colours! To be the mother of such a creature of God as this baby—Kit, it’s the most awful, the most beautiful thing in the world! Why did you ask me that? Whom have you heard talking like a monster, corrupting your naturally good heart?”
“You’re a sharp little woman, though you don’t betray it always, Joan!” Kit said with amused admiration. “I’m not corrupted; I only wondered how you felt. All girls don’t like babies.”
Joan gave him a keen look.
“Avoid the kind that doesn’t,” she advised, tersely.
“First God made angels, then us, and He made everybody but Adam and Eve a baby,” said little Anne, anxious as she always was to elevate the conversation to a catechetical standard. “So it would be wicked not to love babies when God made ’em for us to love, and then went and made ’em so darling that you have to love ’em. Herod didn’t, but he was a fearfully wicked king. They were all boys, anyway.”