"There is a new branch at the Ministry," said Kitty, "which is concerned exclusively with Uncertificated Babies, how to deal with them."
"An' how do they deal with them, the poor little ducks?" enquired Pansy, who had just come in from the garden looking more than usually gay and lovely and fantastic in a pink sunbonnet and the kind of dress affected by milkmaids in a chorus.
Kitty looked at her thoughtfully.
"I should hardly like to tell you. You mightn't like it. Besides, it's a private department, like the secret room in jam factories where they make the pips. No, Pansy love, I can't possibly tell you.... But they do deal with them, quite effectively."
Pansy tossed her Cheeper up and down to a gentle music-hall ditty.
"Who'll buy babies—
Babies better dead?
Here's every mental category,
From C3 down to Z...."
It was a taking song as she crooned it on the stage, nursing an infant on each arm, and with a baby-chorus crying behind her.
4
After breakfast on Sunday morning Kitty remarked that she was going by train to Beaconsfield, where she had arranged to meet Chester for a walk through Burnham Beeches. She as a rule made no secret of her walks with Chester, only occasionally, when self-consciousness took her. After all, why should she? One went walks with all sorts of people, with any man or woman who liked walking and talking and whom one liked as a companion; it implied nothing. Kitty at times, with all it meant in this instance burning and alive in her consciousness, had to pause to tell herself how little it did imply to others, how she might mention it freely and casually, without fear. Yet might she? The intimacy of the Minister of a Department with one of his clerks was, no doubt, out of the ordinary, not quite like other intimacies; perhaps it did seem odd, and imply things. Perhaps Kitty might have thought so herself, in another case.
She announced her plan this morning with an extra note of casualness in her voice.