rly off.

'Yes, it's dreadful having our face washed, isn't it?' said Mrs
Blackshaw, with her sleeves up, and her hair by this time down. 'We
don't like it, do we? Yes, yes.'

Emmie grunted, without a sound, and yet Mrs Blackshaw heard her, and
finished that face quickly and turned to the hands.

'Potato-gardens every day,' she said. 'Evzy day-day. Enough of that,
Colonel!' (For, after all, she had plenty of spirit.) 'Fat little
creases! Fat little creases! There! He likes that! There! Feet! Feet!
Feet and legs! Then our back. And then WHUP we shall go into the bath!
That's it. Kick! Kick your mother!'

And she turned him over.

'Incredible bungler!' said the eyes of the nurse. 'Can't she turn him
over neater than that?'

'Harridan!' said the eyes of Mrs Blackshaw. 'I wouldn't let you bath
him for twenty thousand pounds!'

Roger continued to breathe hard, as if his mother were a horse and he
were rubbing her down.

'Now! Zoop! Whup!' cried his mother, and having deprived him of his
final rag, she picked him up and sat him in the bath, and he was
divinely happy, and so were the women. He appeared a gross little
animal in the bath, all the tints of his flesh shimmering under the
electric light. His chest was superb, but the rolled and creased
bigness of his inordinate stomach was simply appalling, not to mention
his great thighs and calves. The truth was, he had grown so that if he
had been only a little bit bigger, he would have burst the bath. He
resembled an old man who had been steadily eating too much for about
forty years.

His two womenfolk now candidly and openly worshipped him, forgetting
sectarian differences.

And he splashed. Oh! he splashed. You see, he had learnt how to splash,
and he had certainly got an inkling that to splash was wicked and
messy. So he splashed--in his mother's face, in Emmie's face, in the
fire. He pretty well splashed the fire out. Ten minutes before, the
bedroom had been tidy, a thing of beauty. It was now naught but a wild
welter of towels, socks, binders--peninsulas of clothes nearly
surrounded by water.

Finally his mother seized him again, and, rearing his little legs up
out of the water, immersed the whole of his inflated torso beneath the
surface.

'Hallo!' she exclaimed. 'Did the water run over his mouf? Did it?'

'Angels and ministers of grace defend us! How clumsy she is!' commented
the eyes of Emmie.

'There! I fink that's about long enough for this kind o