confinement came to see how I was going along.

I told her of the dimness of my sight and the aching of my eyeballs,
whereupon she held up her hands and cried:

"There now! What did I tell you? Didn't I say it is _after_ a lady feels
it?"

The moral of her prediction was that, being in a delicate state of
health, and having "let myself low" before baby was born, it was my duty
to wean her immediately.

I could not do it.

Although the nurse's advice was supported by my Welsh landlady (with
various prognostications of consumption and rickets), I could not at
first deny myself the wild joy of nursing my baby.

But a severer monitor soon came to say that I must. I found that my
money was now reduced to little more than two pounds, and that I was
confronted by the necessity (which I had so long put off) of looking for
employment.

I could not look for employment until I had found a nurse for my child,
and I could not find a nurse until my baby could do without me, so when
Isabel was three weeks old I began to wean her.

At first I contented myself with the hours of night, keeping a
feeding-bottle in bed, with the cow's milk warmed to the heat of my own
body. But when baby cried for the breast during the day I could not find
it in my heart to deny her.

That made the time of weaning somewhat longer than it should have been,
but I compromised with my conscience by reducing still further my meagre
expenses.

Must I tell how I did so?

Although it was the month of July there was a snap of cold weather such
as sometimes comes in the middle of our English summer, and yet I gave
up having a fire in my room, and for the cooking of my food I bought a
small spirit stove which cost me a shilling.

This tempted me to conduct which has since had consequences, and I am
half ashamed and half afraid to speak of it. My baby linen being little
I had to wash it frequently, and having no fire I . . . dried it on my
own body.

Oh, I see now it was reckless foolishness, almost wilful madness, but I
thought nothing of it then. I was poor and perhaps I was proud, and I
could not afford a fire. And then a mother's love is as deep as the sea,
and there was nothing in the wide world I would not have done to keep my
darling a little longer beside me.

Baby being weaned at last I had next to think of a nurse, and that was a
still more painful ordeal. To give my child to another woman, who was to
be the same as a second mother to her,