ll
the same. I said to my daughter, 'Look here, you let me alone, either I
know what to do or I don't know what to do.' I used to give mine
toast-water, that was all." She tucked up the lank pads of hair clinging
to either side of her face. "You boil two or three crusts of bread...."

"Oh, I know," interrupted the woman with the drowned-corpse face.

"Mine has bronchitis," went on the ogress. "I wonder where he caught it.
He never goes out and he sleeps close to the stove. I am going to try
and see if I can't get a bottle of syrup...."

The folding-doors opened, a white-clad nurse made a sign, and all rose,
each with the same enamored hugging-to-her of her wailing burden.

The crowd poured into an immense, well-heated room paved with white
flag-stones and painted white. The light beat down hard through a row of
bay-windows. At the far end presided a handsome old man in a white
smock, an immaculate nurse at his side. "The doctor!" whispered the
women in a tone of awed hostility. The man did indeed seem indifferent
and just as God should be.

Spread out symmetrically on the bare table in front of him among other
instruments was a complete apparatus of justice, bright and
glittering--a set of scales with a basket and a row of copper weights
drawing clamorous notes from the straggling music of the sunshine.

With remarkable dexterity the women undid the swaddling-clothes,
turning, tucking up, unwrapping. The blonde swelled out her bosom as she
stuck it full of pins; the ogress held her pins between her teeth. A
suffocating odor of warm wool, sour milk, perspiration, and stale flesh
arose amid the cries.

The line began to move. One after the other they went up tendering their
children like poor plucked bruised flowers, with the idolatrous,
skulking faith of believers approaching God.

From my bench, my heart frightfully wrung, I saw each showing me what I
might make of my child ... a baby with its neck seamed with a reddish
crack ... a baby with tiny, tiny limbs beneath an abdomen swelling like
a bagpipe ... a baby whose ribs striped its body like a zebra's hide ...
a baby with a back all covered with boils....

"He has green movements." "He has a swollen stomach." "He has ringworm."
"He coughs." And the same slack answers to the doctor's questions: "I
don't know.--I don't know.--I don't know."

The man cast his sovereign glance over the printed form held out to him,
handled the little body, remained impassive wh