NNIE! Sophie! come up quick, and see baby in her bath-tub!” cries a charming little maiden, running down the wide stairway of an old country house, and half-way up the long hall, all in a fluttering cloud of pink lawn, her soft dimpled cheeks tinged with the same lovely morning hue. In an instant there is a stir and a gush of light laughter in the drawing-room, and presently, with a movement a little more majestic and elder-sisterly, Annie and Sophie float noiselessly through the hall and up the soft-carpeted ascent, as though borne on their respective clouds of blue and white drapery, and take their way to the nursery, where a novel entertainment awaits them. It is the first morning of the eldest married sister’s first visit home, with her first baby; and the first baby, having slept late after its journey, is about to take its first bath in the old house.
“Well, I declare, if here isn’t mother, forgetting her dairy, and Cousin Nellie, too, who must have left poor Ned all to himself in the garden, lonely and disconsolate, and I am torn from my books, and Sophie from her flowers, and all for the sake of seeing a nine-month-old baby kicking about in a bath-tub! What simpletons we are!”
Thus Miss Annie, the proude layde of the family; handsome, haughty, with perilous proclivities toward grand socialistic theories, transcendentalism, and general strong-mindedness; pledged by many a saucy vow to a life of single dignity and freedom, given to studies artistic, æsthetic, philosophic and ethical; a student of Plato, an absorber of Emerson, an exalter of her sex, a contemner of its natural enemies.
“Simpletons, are we?” cries pretty Elinor Lee, aunt of the baby on the other side, and “Cousin Nellie” by love’s courtesy, now kneeling close by the bath-tub, and receiving on her sunny braids a liberal baptism from the pure, plashing hands of babyhood,—“simpletons, indeed! Did I not once see thee, O Pallas-Athene, standing rapt before a copy of the ‘Crouching Venus?’ and this is a sight a thousand times more beautiful; for here we have color, action, radiant life, and such grace as the divinest sculptors of Greece were never able to entrance in marble. Just look at these white, dimpled shoulders, every dimple holding a tiny, sparkling drop,—these rosy, plashing feet and hands,—this laughing, roguish face,—these eyes, bright and blue and deep as lakes of fairy-land,—these ears, like dainty sea-shells,—these locks of gold, dripping diamonds,—and tell me what cherub of Titian, what Cupid of Greuze, was ever half so lovely. I say, too, that Raphael himself would have jumped at the chance of painting Louise, as she sits there, towel in hand, in all the serene pride and chastened dignity of young maternity,—of painting her as Madonna.”
“Why, Cousin Nellie is getting poetical for once, over a baby in a bath-tub!”
“Well, Sophie, isn’t it a subject to inspire real poets, to call out and yet humble the genius of painters and sculptors? Isn’t it an object for the reverence of ‘a glorious human creature,’—such a pure and perfect form of physical life, such a starry little soul, fresh from the hands of God? If your Plato teaches otherwise, Cousin Annie, I’m glad I’ve no acquaintance with that distinguished heathen gentleman; if your Carlyle, with his ‘soul above buttons’ and babies, would growl, and your Emerson smile icily at the sight, away with them!”
“Why, Nellie, you goose, Carlyle is ‘a man and a brother,’ in spite of his ‘Latter-day Pamphlets,’ and no ogre. I believe he is very well disposed toward babies in general; while Emerson is as tender as he is great. Have you forgotten his ‘Threnody,’ in which the sob of a mortal’s sorrow rises and swells into an immortal’s pean? I see that baby is very lovely; I think that Louise may well be proud of her. It’s a pity that she must grow up into conventionalities and all that,—perhaps become some man’s plaything, or slave.”
“O don’t, sister!—‘sufficient for the day is the worriment thereof.’ But I think you and Nellie are mistaken about the pride. I am conscious of no such feeling in regard to my little Florence, but only of joy, gratitude, infinite tenderness, and solicitude.”
Thus the young mother,—for the first time speaking, but not turning her eyes from the bath-tub.
“Ah, coz, it won’t go! Young mothers are the proudest of living creatures. The sweetest and saintliest among you have a sort of subdued exultation, a meek assumption, an adorable insolence, toward the whole unmarried and childless world. I have never seen anything like it elsewhere.”