"Aunt Caroline one day took me into her confidence and showed me what she called her scrap-heap. It was a big box full of photographs that had been presented to her from time to time, and she calculated that if she had had them all framed, as their donors had doubtless expected, it would have cost her some hundreds of pounds. While her back was turned I looked through the collection. Your photograph was there—and mine, Suzanne."
"Anyhow, we shall want one to keep ourselves. Think what a pleasure it will be to him when he grows up to see what he looked like as a tiny baby."
I called to mind an ancestral album belonging to my own family that I had carefully kept guarded from Suzanne precisely for the reason that it contained various presentments of myself at early ages in mirth-compelling garments and attitudes; but of course I could not now urge that chamber of horrors in opposition to her demand.
"Besides," she went on, "we needn't buy any copies at all if we don't like them. Snapper and Klick are continually worrying me to have Baby taken. Once a week regularly, ever since the announcement of his birth appeared, they've rung me up to ask when he will give them a sitting. Sometimes it's Snapper and sometimes it's Klick; I don't know which is which, but one of them has adenoids. We can't do any harm by taking him there, because they say in their circulars they present two copies free and there's no obligation to purchase any."
"I wonder how they make that pay?"
"Oh," said Suzanne, "they keep the copyright, you know, and then when he does anything famous they send it round to the illustrated papers, which pay them no end of money for permission to reproduce it."
"But by the time he does anything famous," I objected, "won't this photograph be a trifle out of date? Supposing, for instance, in twenty or thirty years' time he marries a Movie Queen——"
Just then the telephone-bell rang, and Suzanne, as is her wont, rushed to answer it, dropping Timothy into my arms on the way.
"Hello!" I heard her say. "Yes; speaking. Yes, I was just going to write. Yes; that will do quite well. What? Yes, about eleven. Good-bye."
"Not another appointment with the dressmaker?" I inquired.