“I don’t see how the kid could be much fitter.”
“It’s not so much what he is now. She is worrying about what might happen to him. She can talk about bacilli till your flesh creeps. Honestly, if Bill ever did get really ill, I believe Aunt Lora could talk me round to her views about them in a minute. It’s only the fact that he is so splendidly well that makes it seem so absurd.”
Kirk laughed.
“It’s all very well to laugh. You haven’t heard her. I’ve caught myself wavering a dozen times. Do you know, she says a child ought not to be kissed?”
“It has struck me,” said Kirk meditatively, “that your Aunt Lora, if I may make the suggestion, is the least bit of what Steve would call a shy-dome. Is there anything else she had mentioned?’
“Hundreds of things. Bill ought to be kept in a properly sterilized nursery, with sterilized toys and sterilized everything, and the temperature ought to be just so high and no higher, and just so low and no lower. Get her to talk about it to you. She makes you wonder why everybody is not dead.”
“This is a new development, surely? Has she ever broken out in this place before?”
“Oh, yes. In the old days she often used to talk about it. She has written books about it.”
“I thought her books were all about the selfishness of the modern young man in not marrying.”
“Not at all. Some of them are about how to look after the baby. It’s no good the modern young man marrying if he’s going to murder his baby directly afterward, is it?”