heless. It ceased to twinge when Vassie came
down, her husband with her, to pay him a visit--partly because, he
guessed, it was to see that all was being done for the baby's welfare in
such a masculine house that she had come.

Vassie was resplendent, and if she did not love her husband ecstatically
she was intensely proud of him. She had become an enthusiastic Radical,
and talked of the rights of the people as to the manner bred. Ishmael
suppressed a smile, feeling himself completely the embodiment of
opposite views, and liked her husband in spite of it. He was just not
quite a gentleman--a little too vivid, too clever, too emphatic; but
that he would go far even the Parson believed. Ishmael was grateful to
the pair for coming, and never asked Vassie why she, who held such
socialistic views, had not come to stay when Phoebe was alive.

Afterwards he realised the chief debt he owed to Vassie was that she
first opened his eyes to the delightfulness of his child. One evening of
winter he happened to come in earlier than usual, at the sacred hour of
the bath, and Vassie promptly pounced on him and made him come up to the
room she had arranged according to her modern ideas--the modernity of
'69--as a nursery. A fire leapt in the grate from behind a thing like a
wire meat-safe that Ishmael had never seen before and that had never
been considered necessary to keep him or his brothers from a fiery
death. Before it was spread a creamy-hued blanket, on which stood an
oval bath from whose lip a cloud of steam wavered up, the incense of
this ritual. Vassie sat beside it, a towel over her knees, and sprawling
upon it, its bent legs kicking in the air, its tiny fists clutching at
everything and nothing with the instinctive grasp of life, lay the baby.

James Nicholas Ruan--so called after his uncle and the Parson--was a
little over three months old, just the age when a baby begins to be
attractive even to a male observer.

Ishmael watched him as Vassie skilfully dipped and dried him, turning
him about on her lap to dust the powder into the interstices of his tiny
person, and, far from resenting this as an indignity, he seemed to think
it all a huge joke. Yet the jollity of him, his sudden smiles and his
clutchings and wavings, all seemed addressed to himself alone--part of
some life he alone knew, some vision he alone could see. As he was
soaped and patted, and powdered and turned, there was always the air
about him of a being re