The professor and his wife were uncomfortable enough in this stage, but in the third they really suffered, though of course with cheerful resignation; for were they not enduring their hardships in the interest of science and for the good of mankind? The third stage is known to science as microbophobia parentum; in popular parlance, the baby stage. Its symptoms are most pronounced in the female. The first thing you do in this stage is to order Madame di Ana's Daily, "The Mother-Maker," together with her two fine volumes on "The Mistakes of Mothers," and "Microbes in the Home." You also join the Mothers' Club, and take your husband to the open meetings. You make him cut off his beard, because you have read how it looks under the microscope—and he will kiss the baby. You boil not only the drinking water, but the water for the baby's bath, and the water you wash your hands in before you take him up; and you insist on the sterilization of all the baby's linen, and all the nurse's apparel. You are determined that the child shall be brought up scientifically, and not be exposed to the risks you ran in your childhood. Having read that mothers are subject to excitement, and that excitement is bad for the fountain source of baby's sustenance, you substitute a bottle; and you use pasteurized milk scientifically compounded with other ingredients which nature forgot to employ in her chemistry; and warm it in a sterilized glass jar, set in sterilized water in a sterilized pan in a room which is disinfected twice a day, and you test it with a sterilized thermometer. You keep on hand a bath of boiling water in which you sterilize at frequent intervals all the usual playthings—nipples, rubber rings, rattles, etc.; and you make due provision for the little fingers which seem so bent on going into the little mouth.
In this stage you also avoid shaking hands, never allow yourself to touch a door knob barehanded, and leave off drawing books from the library, determined to be neither a borrower nor a lender of books or anything else; and, even though your church has deferred to scientific suggestion and introduced individual communion cups, you still shrink from the sacrament because the bread, too, is not individualized, and you are not sure about the linen which covered it, or the silver which contained the grape juice, or the person who picked the grapes, or the feet by which the juice was trodden out.
The fourth stage is known as microbophobic moscophobia, which is the pathological term describing the fear of flies as carriers of infection. You get new screens, interrupt the housemaid every half hour with orders to see whether there are more flies to be found, cover the baby and yourself with netting when you nap, have a cement pit made for the garbage can, and repaper or repaint your interiors—that is, the interiors of your house—every six months. You read, too, that mosquitoes carry yellow fever in the West Indies, and malaria in Italy—distant places, indeed; but still, why shouldn't mosquitoes fly across the sea and land and light on the baby, or yourself? So you screen the household by day as well as by night, and avoid evenings out and picnics in the shade.
In the latter part of this stage you also change your religion on account of the communion service, have your letters disinfected, leave off kissing the baby, steer to windward of rug-beaters and street sweepers, hold your breath as you pass dogs and cats, eat nothing not cooked, drink nothing not boiled, carry a bottle of microbicide in your pocket, dream that the earth is full of microbes as the waters cover the sea, and that the hand of every one of them is lifted against you, and have cold sweats at night and cold feet by day. You realize that you are uncomfortable, but the real cause of it never occurs to you: you attribute your condition to the uncleanliness of your environment, and to your willingness to sacrifice your own comfort to the cause of scientific sanitation.
By this time, too, your sense of humor, never very robust, has decayed, atrophied, and disappeared. Your fat, good-humored, unscientific neighbor calls out from his back porch as you come out to yours to get the milk bottle: "Dangerous stuff, that there! They say they's forty-three million four hundred an' ninety-nine thousand two hundred an' seventeen microbes in a half a drop of it"—and you don't laugh, any more than you laugh when you advise your professor friend to disinfect the contents of his pay envelope, and he replies, "Don't worry—there's no microbe could ever live on my salary!"
In the fifth stage you begin to be physically as well as spiritually uncomfortable. In the eloquent words of the old hymn, you are a prey to "fightings without and fears within." What with the insufficiency of your means to meet the demands of disinfection, and what with the difficulty of getting properly prepared food even if you have the money, and what with the continual strain of anxiety lest you entertain a microbe unawares, you grow thin and nervous. Of course you continue to lay it to microbes, and double your precautions—and worry more, and starve more. If you are not rescued, you finally pass into delirium microbophobicum, which is as much more awful than delirium tremens as microbes are smaller and more insidious and wiser than serpents.
The professor and his wife entered upon the fifth stage, and were alarmingly near the last extreme. If this were a subject for levity, and not for high seriousness, I should be tempted to parody the essayist on Man, and say:
Lo, the poor professor, whose untutored mind
Saw microbes in the clouds, and heard them in the wind.
But they were saved. One night the professor's wife dreamed that a monster centipedal microbe slowly let himself down from the ceiling, and enveloped her in his hundred long wriggling legs. She awoke screaming, to find herself enmeshed in the mosquito bar.
The next day they called another doctor. Hitherto, their doctors themselves had been infected, though neither they nor their patients knew it. But this time they were more fortunate; Dr. Goodenough had been attacked by the disease, had made a brilliant recovery, and consequently was immune.