Mrs. Sharpless looked at him with a severity not unmingled with suspicion. “Sometimes, young man,” she observed, “you talk like a—a—a gump!”
“Take that, Strong!” said Mr. Clyde, joining in the doctor’s laugh against himself.
“Facts may sometimes sound foolish,” admitted Dr. Strong. “If they do, that’s the fault of the speaker. And it is a fact that every mother teaches her baby to play. Watch the cat if you don’t believe me. The wisest woman in America points out in her recent book that it is the mother’s playing with her baby which rouses in it the will to live. Without that will to live none of us would survive.”
“I don’t know who your wisest woman in America may be, but I don’t believe she knows what she is talking about,” declared Grandma Sharpless flatly.
“I’ve never known her when she didn’t,” retorted the doctor. “If Jane Addams of Hull House isn’t an expert in life, mental, moral, and physical, then there’s no such person! Why, see here, Mrs. Sharpless; do you know why a baby’s chance of survival is less in the very best possible institution without its mother, than in the very worst imaginable tenement with its mother, even though the mother is unable to nurse it?”
“It isn’t as well tended, I expect.”
“All its physical surroundings are a thousand times more advantageous: better air, better food, better temperature, better safeguarding against disease; yet babies in these surroundings just pine away and die. It’s almost impossible to bring up an infant on an institutional system. The infant death-rate of these well-meaning places is so appalling that nobody dares tell it publicly. And it is so, simply because there is no one to play with the babies. The nurses haven’t the time, though they have the instinct. I tell you, the most wonderful, mystic, profound thing in all the world, to me, is the sight of a young girl’s intuitive yearning to dandle every baby she may see. That’s the universal world-old, world-wide, deep-rooted genius of motherhood, which antedates the humankind, stirring within her and impelling her to help keep the race alive—by playing with the baby.”
“H’m! I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” confessed Grandma Sharpless. “There may be something in what you say, young man. But by the time children reach school age I guess they’ve learned that lesson.”
“Not always. At least, not properly, always. Let’s consult the Committee on School of our household organization.”
He sent for eight-year-old Julia.