Then I realized I had come there to occupy
myself in my period of expectancy and catch a glimpse of my child in
advance.

The woman's face was bloodless, like the face of a drowned corpse, and
fanned by long colorless locks limp as seaweed. Seeing the supplication
in my eyes she lifted up the thick dirty-gray shawl with the air of a
benefactress. "Three months." The first thing they tell of a child is
its age.

The little worm very leisurely wrinkled its forehead of peeling satin
and stretched itself, opened two rather glassy eyes encircled by mauve,
and let out its guttural wail through a toothless aperture upholstered
with flesh. The provident mother had already pulled a rubber pacifier
out of her pocket, which transformed the wail into a monotonous greedy
gurgle. "Will you be quiet! They're an awful trouble. You'll see," she
declared, gauging my heavy figure. "I had bad luck, I had no milk. No
use giving him gravy or bread soaked and boiled. He doesn't get any good
out of them. If you think you can fatten them on the doctor's fine
words, as if the doctors even know what they're talking about!"

"I believe you!" bawled a big blonde. The baby which she had a
triumphant way of carrying had hanging cheeks and bottle-blue eyes in
button-hole slits. "Just look at mine. At nine months it ate like us.
What do you say to that, eh?"

A group gathered. "What are you here for then?" asked a huge creature
with a gray ogress head, high cheekbones and skin streaked with fine
veins. The blonde turned her baby over and showed its chubby flesh
covered with a crusty, scabby, red-streaked sheath. "Oh, only this."

The ogress dropped into an empty place on the bench and paraded her
darling on her knees. "My daughter's," she explained to the circle
around her. "Her third. Maybe you think she hasn't got something to
worry about--three babies and working in a factory. Babies--I know a
thing or two about babies. I've had eleven." There was a general stir of
compassion followed by protests. "I have two left." She danced the mite
on her knee. Her tower of a body swayed back and forth, through her
half-open jacket you could divine her dead breasts. There was something
weird and horrible in the dismal accustomedness of her knees.

"The doctors make you fuss such a lot. You give the babies too much, and
you don't give 'em enough, and you don't bathe 'em, and you don't weigh
'em. There wasn't such a lot of talk in my time, but they grew up a