In a reckless moment he gave Rosie a nickel, and this wealth, combined with her recent danger and escape, and with the intoxicating quality of her audience, made Rosie follow Giusseppi to the other end of the line of carriages which trailed round the corner and half-way down the next block. Here fresh triumphs awaited her, while from the steps of Fraternity Hall her infant sister called aloud for instant speech with her. The infant was still making these inarticulate demands, when Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown, holding her skirts well above her shoe tops with one hand, while with the other she applied a bottle of lavender salts to her nose, approached the meeting. She was late but unflurried. Her horses, somewhat racked by the elevated trains in Allen Street, had been entirely unnerved by the children, the push-carts, the dogs, and the flying papers, which beset them from all sides and sprang up under their nervous feet. So the philanthropic Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown had alighted from her carriage, secured a small though knowing-looking guide, and walked to her destination. Presently she reached the hall, rewarded her guide, and stopped in her surge up the steps by the yells of the youngest Rashnowsky, which had broken free of its mummy clothes, and was battling for breath with two arms like slate-pencils—as cold, as thin, as gray, and seemingly as brittle.
"Whose child is this?" she demanded of a near and large chauffeur. It was not the lady's fault that much philanthropic activity had so formed her manner that these simple words, as she said them, seemed to infer that the large green-clad chauffeur was a Rousseau among parents, that the child was his, starved that he might grow fat, and abandoned that he might go free. His reply was all that her manner demanded. And when she repeated the question to other waiting men, she was hardly answered at all.
Meanwhile the youngest Rashnowsky banged its hairless head upon the cold stone, and reiterated its demands for its guardian sister. Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown was puzzled, and she did not enjoy the sensation. She picked up the child before she had planned any further step for its disposition. She could not well drop it on the stone again, and there was no one to whom she could give it. Realizing with a sudden sense of outrage that she was affording amusement to the well-trained servants of her Cornelia associates, she retreated into the building and into the hall with the screaming Gracchus in her arms.
Her advent and the clamor of her burden interrupted the reading of a paper upon "Nursery Emergencies, and How to Meet Them," by a young lady who had exhausted the family physician, and such books as he could be persuaded to lend her. Her remarks, though interesting and authoritative, could not prevail against the howling presence of a real nursery emergency, and the attention of the audience stampeded to Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown and her contribution to the meeting. That practised and disgusted philanthropist relinquished the youngest Rashnowsky to the first pair of pitying arms extended in its direction. But pity was not what the sufferer craved, and she repudiated it eloquently.
"What shall I do with it?" cried this young Cornelia, looking helplessly around upon her fellows. "Whenever my Jimmie behaved like this I used simply to ring for Louise. I never knew what she used to do with him."
Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown snorted. "A nurse!" said she, "a hireling! You relegate a mother's sacred responsibilities to a servant." Mrs. Ponsonby-Brown had never enjoyed these responsibilities, and so was eloquent and authoritative upon them.
Other Cornelias fluttered about suggesting that the Gracchus was suffering from hunger, colic, or misdirected pins. The expert upon emergencies snatched this one from its embarrassed guardian, inverted it across her knee, and patted it manfully upon the back. The dirtiness of it, the thinness, the squalled wrappings, and the blue little hands and feet touched and quickened the Cornelias as no lecture could have done, and the resourceful vice-president found cause to congratulate herself on the milieu of the meeting.
"If we knew," said a bespectacled Cornelia sensibly and practically, "what food they were giving it, we could easily send out and get a meal for it."
"It hardly looks," interrupted another, "like the Mellin's Food and Nestle's Milk Babies one sees in the advertisements."
"And yet," said the practical member, "we can't do anything until we know what it's accustomed to. With so young a child——"