On a day in September which brought the first faint whiff of autumn a telephone call came from Lewis Kane. He had returned that morning, he said, was extremely busy with the accumulation at his office and would be for a week or more. Was everything all right? Perfectly, Lora reported; all departments of the factory were running smoothly. Splendid, he said, he would call again.
Throughout the fall months they met every week or so for a pleasant and unexciting dinner. Lora, expecting every moment to be bored, found to her surprise, that his invitations were always welcome, tried to account for it by various theories all of which turned out to be unsatisfactory, and ended by accepting it with an indifferent shrug. Certainly he was unfailingly courteous and good-tempered, and never intolerably inquisitive. Immediately upon his return he placed a car at her disposal, and a little later got her one of her own, a little dark-blue sedan. She wanted to drive it herself, but he begged her earnestly not to take the risk.
“A pregnant woman is too much of a fatalist to drive a car,” he declared. “The doctrine of absolute determinism is essentially a feminine philosophy, based on the uncontrollable nature of conception. That isn’t original. I’ve been investigating the matter. To tell the truth, Jameson, the specialist at Presbyterian, an old friend of mine, was with me in Canada. He used the word fatalist.”
“A pregnant woman is like any other woman.”
“Nonsense. You don’t believe that at all. Do you now?”
“Admirable, I don’t pretend to any right to command, but I do most earnestly entreat you—”
“All right, I won’t.”
So around the park or shopping—sometimes into the country —she went comfortably cushioned on the back seat, with Panther beside her and Morris occasionally on her lap, more often on that of Leah in the other corner, and Roy in front with the chauffeur. Roy, supposed to begin kindergarten this fall, had talked himself out of it by announcing at the end of the third day, not with any bitterness, that the teacher had reprimanded him for putting a paper cow’s tail on the front end instead of the hind one.
“Then she’s a pedant,” said Lora. “There’s nothing sacred about the position of a cow’s tail. Do you want to go back?”
“No. She blows her nose like this.” Roy pulled out his handkerchief, covered most of his face with it, and squealed like a mouse in a trap.
“Do it again,” said Panther, waddling over and looking up at him admiringly. That exhibition, Lora figured, cost at least an extra month in Panther’s education in the technique of nose-blowing.
Lewis Kane was never a member of the family motor excursions; indeed, he had never once entered the little apartment on Seventy-first Street. Lora mildly wondered why. Discretion, perhaps; but he had been to the door fifty times; he always got out of the car when he brought her home from dinner, handed her out, and escorted her to the vestibule. Was he waiting for an invitation? Improbable, for once when she had suggested that he might like to see the children enjoying the toys which his generosity had made possible he had passed it off with a reference to his unfortunate ineptitude with youngsters. She had never repeated the hint, thinking it just as well; he would be sufficiently a nuisance after Julian came. She had accepted the Julian with the same indifference with which she had greeted Helen’s transformation into Panther. If it were a daughter, presumably it would be Julia; but maybe not, since he already had one; at least his wife had.
One cold snowy afternoon in December, with Panther beside her in the blue sedan and Roy in front, she gave the chauffeur Anne Seaver’s address in Brooklyn. Leah, with Morris and his bottles and other paraphernalia, remained behind. The beige silk from Roy’s time, recalled to service two months back, and now covered by a warm fur coat, comfortably encircled her daily expanding rotundity. The ample fullness which had in September made it hang like an ill-made bag was now barely adequate; a seam might yet have to be altered if it kept up at this rate.
She wore the beige silk purposely, in ironic memory of a day five years earlier under circumstances which differed violently from the present in all respects but one—that one being the phenomenon which made the beige silk necessary. Anne had then hated her, with the hatred of the guilty for the innocent victim, but Lora had never hated Anne. Her present ironic gesture was friendly in its intent, and she knew it would not be resented. She had not seen Anne for many months, not since the days following Max’s death; and for one thing she thought that the sight of Roy might give her pleasure.
Anne was not at home. I should have telephoned, thought Lora; anyway it was a nice ride through the falling snow. But, the maid added, Mrs. Seaver was expected back at any moment, she had gone out for lunch and had said she would return at three. Lora took off the children’s wraps and her own, helped the maid with them to the hall, and entered the living room just in time to drag Roy out of the fireplace. When Anne came not long after she found them all seated on the rug in front of the fire; Roy was explaining to Panther why it made a fire go better to spit on it; Lora, unheeding, smiled at the flames.
“What a picture!” Anne exclaimed, advancing on them. She was tall and slender, not quite filled out anywhere, with long straight legs and arms, a thin neck that showed the tendons, a good forehead and nose and chin but everything a little too sharp; twenty pounds tastefully distributed would have done wonders.
“I’m too comfortable to get up,” said Lora. “Roy, you remember Anne Seaver, don’t you? Of course you do. Anne, dear, you look younger and more virginal every day. Now that I’m here I wonder why I stayed away so long. Roy, don’t you remember Anne Seaver?”
Roy ducked his head and mumbled, “Hello.”
“Of course you do,” said Anne. “Don’t you remember, a long time ago, I gave you the red engine with a whistle on it?”
“It’s broke.”
“Yes, it would be. We must get another. Heavens, how you’ve grown! And Helen too—Lora, she’s as beautiful as a dream. Albert’s nose and mouth, obviously, don’t you think? But where’s the baby?”
Spiteful nervous woman, thought Lora; but no, probably it was envy, not spite, and certainly she had been helpful and sympathetic about Max, more really than had been required. Anne sat beside her on the rug, and they gazed into the fire together and answered each other’s questions, while Panther nodded drowsily and finally slept and Roy tiptoed from room to room in search of a cat which he had seen gliding shadowlike from underneath a sofa. Lora learned that Mr. Seaver, Anne’s husband, had been made vice-president of something or other and had subscribed to the opera; furthermore, that they had definitely decided on a trip to Europe the coming summer.
“I don’t suppose you’ll go to China,” Lora remarked.
Anne gave her a sharp glance, then said quietly, “That’s nasty, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is,” Lora agreed. “But surely, after five years, you don’t mean to say you’re still tender about him?”
After a long silence Anne said to the fire: “It really wasn’t at all nasty. You probably know there’s no one else on earth I can talk to about Steve Adams. Though why I should want to talk about him.… Yes, I’m still tender. But I always was tender, and you were always tough. Tougher than him even. Today when I came in and heard you were here I thought at first you had heard from him and my heart stopped still; I stood at the door for ten seconds with my heart as dead as a rock. As soon as I saw your face I knew you hadn’t. You haven’t?”
Lora shook her head. “You didn’t notice that I’m wearing the dress I had on the day he told me to go to hell?”
“Yes, and I was surprised, I thought you’d forgotten it.…”
“It’s a symbol. Thumbing my nose. Not at poor Steve particularly, just anyone. At the father of my new baby, perhaps. You hadn’t noticed?”
Anne laughed, a laugh without warmth that began abruptly, showed for a moment her perfect gleaming teeth, and ended more abruptly still.
“My dear, you might as well have it on a signboard. I thought perhaps it wasn’t being discussed. You certainly waste no time?”
“Due in a month,” Lora announced. “It is to be a boy.”
“Are you married?”
“Of course not. There is a father though.”
Anne looked at her, shivered a little, and looked again at the fire. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it were my own husband,” she said. “Honestly I wouldn’t; you know he wants children. I wouldn’t put anything in the world above you or beneath you. You never did love Steve, did you? But you have his son. When I looked at Roy today, and thought, that is Steve’s son, it made me feel empty and sick inside. I hated you; I do hate you I think; you never loved Steve; you don’t even love Roy, you look at him as if he were a chair or something, something you’d gone out and bought somewhere—”
She stopped abruptly, still looking into the fire. I shouldn’t have come, thought Lora, I shouldn’t have brought him, poor Anne.
“I shouldn’t have brought him,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“No. You shouldn’t have brought him. I’m miserable, Lo, just completely miserable. That was what he called you, wasn’t it?”
A cat’s frightful howl came from the hall. “Roy!” called Lora instantly, as quick as a reflex. Panther, startled out of her sleep, sat up with wide eyes. Anne was on her feet at once, calling out, “Siesta, Siesta darling!” and off she went.
Roy met her at the door. “I didn’t hurt it any,” he declared. “It wouldn’t come out.”
“You little devil.” Anne brushed past him into the hall. “Siesta darling, where are you?”
“Come here,” said Lora. He walked over to her, calmly and with poise.
“Let me see your hands. Did the cat scratch you?”
He shook his head. “It couldn’t. It was behind that thing in the hall.”
“Did you pull its tail?”
“It don’t hurt a cat to pull its tail,” he said. “It uses it to hang on trees with.”
“It’s too bad she didn’t scratch you, then you’d know why you shouldn’t pull her tail.”
Anne returned, in her arms a big yellowish brown cat which nestled against her shoulder with its tail moving in little jerks and its eyes closed. She walked over to Roy and stood looking down at him with a bitter intensity. “You are a little devil,” she said, “Now you can pat her nicely and beg her pardon.” But at the scent of the hostile hand the cat scrambled loose, leapt to the floor and disappeared into the hall.
“Don’t get ideas,” said Lora. “All boys pull cats’ tails, it’s practically compulsory. They get over it.”
“Not all of them.”
“Roy will. Come here, dear.” The boy was instantly at her side. “This is manners. You have hurt Anne’s feelings. If you are sorry you will tell her so. Go on.”
Promptly he walked over to Anne and held out his hand, and when she had taken it he smiled at her and said, “I am sorry I pulled your cat’s tail.”
“All right,” she smiled back at him. “But you’re a little devil anyway.”
They left soon after. Anne insisted that they stay for tea, but Lora said no, the children must be got home and fed and put to bed; outside, it was already night, what with the winter solstice so close at hand and the curtain of clouds that had all day obscured the sun and sent the snow down. The snow was still falling as they made their way out to the curb and climbed into the car, Lora with short careful steps to avoid a fall on the slippery pavement.
“I’ll come to see you at the hospital,” called Anne from the door.
During the ride home Lora sat looking idly at the lighted windows and passing cars, her mind on Anne Seaver. It was pathetic and exasperating, she thought, that after four years Anne should still cherish the memory of Steve Adams. Not only the memory, apparently, even a hope—a vague amorphous hope, unfounded and desperate, plainly idiotic. What a waste of passion! A passion that Lora could not begin to understand. Passion was made for action; there was the object, here the purpose, the ultimate reason for both being quite obscure perhaps, but the present intention manifest. But a miserable purposeless passion, with its object so remote and inaccessible that in effect it did not exist at all, was utterly incomprehensible to her. You do not love Roy, Anne had said. Bah, that just didn’t mean anything. She might as well say, you do not love your arm, or your right leg, or your big toe. You love the things you’ve got to have, that’s all. Certainly Anne didn’t have to have Steve Adams; if she did she wouldn’t have lived four years without him—four years of dressing and undressing, of carefully prepared meals, of all the intricate politics, psychic and physical, of a social animal. That wasn’t love, it was a disease, a perversion, a sick clinging to a necessity that did not exist.
Nevertheless Anne was suffering, no pretense about that. Damn Steve Adams. No, that was silly; it wasn’t his fault. Maybe not, but damn him anyway, for it was painful to see Anne suffer. Her husband was an awful clod. Why didn’t he stick a pin in her or something?
In Manhattan the traffic was more than usually congested and moved by almost imperceptible jerks; by the time they reached Seventy-first Street Lora was restless and impatient, for it was past six o’clock and she hated to have the children’s routine disturbed. When they finally arrived and the chauffeur opened the car door Roy tumbled out and fell in the snow, but came up laughing; Panther scrambled out backwards; Lora followed with slow deliberation.
Upstairs there was no light except in the kitchen. The maid came hurrying out when she heard them enter and pressed the switches in the dining room and hall, then helped them with their wraps, shaking off the few snowflakes that had caught them crossing the sidewalk.
“Where’s Miss Kadish?” Lora asked.
“She went out.”
“That’s funny.” Lora pulled Panther’s dress down and brushed back Roy’s hair with her hand. “When did she go?”
“I don’t know. She sent me out for some soap and things and when I came back she was gone.”
“When was that?”
“It was three o’clock, ma’am.”
The woman stood there, not doing anything, not returning to the kitchen. Lora looked at her face, then hurried into the living room, to the little bedroom beyond, and from that into the further one; then through the bath she went to her own room. When she got back to the dining room, having completed the circuit, the maid was there spreading the tablecloth.
“She took the baby with her,” said Lora.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Did she say where she was going?”
“She didn’t say anything.”
Lora looked at her a moment in silence. “Feed the children,” she said abruptly, and returned to the living room, to the little stand in the corner which held the telephone and directory.
When she got the number a woman’s voice answered. No, she said, Leah was not at home; no, she had been away all afternoon. She might be back for dinner and she might not. Where was she? Nobody could tell that, she might be anywhere.
“I understand. This is Mrs. Kadish, isn’t it? This is Lora Winter. This afternoon I went—”
“You know I will not talk to you, Miss Winter. I ring off.”
“Please! It’s about Leah. Wait, please!”
“You have killed her, too, maybe.”
“Please, Mrs. Kadish! This afternoon I went out with the children and left Leah at home with the baby. When I got—”
“Leah should not go there. She is a bad girl. I tell you I ring off.”
A click ended it. Lora stood a moment with the receiver in her hand, then replaced it on the hook.
“The damn old fool,” she said quietly.
She had never telephoned the police before and didn’t know how to go about it. It was quite simple, she discovered. The voice at the other end, rough and casual and disillusioned, told her that no accident to any baby or woman of Leah’s description had been reported; yes, he would see that the patrolmen in the neighborhood were notified; the baby was in a carriage, did she say? Lora asked him to hold the wire and she hurried to the hall and back again.
“No, not in a carriage, she was carrying him.”
“They’ll turn up, ma’am, they always do.” He took her phone number and said he would let her know of any report.
Not in the carriage, that settles it, thought Lora. She picked up the telephone again, then put it down and made her way back to the little corner bedroom. There, in the closet in the corner, she found two empty shelves. Everything was gone, caps, dresses, shirts, stockings, not a diaper to be seen; even the spare rubber blanket was missing. She turned to the crib. It apparently had not been disturbed; the little silk quilt lay neatly folded at one end, and it was there on top of the quilt, in a sealed envelope, that she found the note. The envelope was addressed in pencil, Miss Lora Winter. She tore it open; written on a sheet of her own stationery, also in pencil, were the words, Look in the drawer where you keep the postage stamps.
“Thank god,” said Lora aloud, and on her way to her own room she sat for a moment on Roy’s bed to rest, pressing the palms of her hands against her belly. There was a faint movement there, like the fluttering of a grasshopper imprisoned in cupped hands. She smiled. I’ll have to eat my dinner, she thought, and got up and went to her room and opened the top right-hand drawer of the bureau, where postage stamps were kept. There lay a roll of bills, a few fives and tens and several ones. Ha, she thought, so Leah’s buying a baby, too! But no, this was, of course, to pay for the clothing and diapers. She counted it: eighty-seven dollars. Possibly all she had had, but more likely the result of a detailed appraisal and calculation. Lora folded the bills together and placed them in her purse.
In the dining room Roy and Panther were finishing their mush and milk, with crackers and a raw custard. Lora called out, “You may bring my plate, Hilda,” and sat down across from them. Roy looked over at her solemnly.
“Your face looks funny,” he said. “Where’s Morris?”
“I don’t feel like talking,” said Lora. “Eat your dinner.” After a moment he spoke again: “I’m glad Morris is gone so I can yell all I want to.”
“Be quiet,” Panther said severely,
Lora thought of telephoning the chauffeur to get the car from the garage, but decided against the delay; a taxi would be quicker. Should she have help? Probably it would be better, Albert, the police, Lewis Kane? Albert was no good. Certainly not the police, from what she had heard of them. Lewis Kane perhaps. But he was a lawyer. No, all that would mean complication and delay.…
She finished her dinner, with the maid’s help got the children to bed, and had been in the house altogether less than an hour when she stood again at the door with coat and hat on, woolen gloves and lined galoshes.
“Be careful, ma’am,” Hilda admonished her.
“Yes. You stay till I get back.”
The snow was deep in the street but had stopped falling, and it was turning colder; a crust was beginning to form on top. After a long wait on Central Park West she got a taxi and gave the driver the address, on Manhattan Avenue a few blocks beyond the end of the park. The taxi was not heated, and she pulled the fur coat close. I should have changed my dress, she thought. At One Hundred and First Street the taxi went across to Manhattan Avenue and then headed north again.
She had not seen the place for nearly two years, since the day she had stopped in front of it to wait for Max to go in for his camera, and his mother, leaning from a window above, had seen her and cursed her in Yiddish. It had sounded rather terrifying, and Max, saying not a word, had hustled her off around the corner. The building looked different, it seemed smaller, but there was the number above the door. In the outer vestibule were five buttons on each side with names above them; the middle one on the left said Kadish, and she pressed it, with her other hand against the door waiting for the answering click. It did not come, and she pressed the button again. Still no click. She pushed the button down and held it there, and then jabbed it again and again, viciously. Then she gave it up and went out to the sidewalk and looked up; the windows on the third floor were dark.
Those are just the front rooms, she thought; she must be there, she couldn’t be anywhere else. She returned to the vestibule and pressed the button many times, time and time again, but the door did not open. Half an hour had passed, and she began to feel cold and weary and for the first time a little fearful. If her theory was wrong—but no, she knew Leah Kadish, she knew what was back of those wet black eyes. But where the devil was she? Had they gone off like gypsies? Nomad blood that from the Asiatic sands…for a hundred centuries.…Bosh. She knew Leah all right. It was getting colder every minute.
She had been there a full hour and was about to ring another bell to get inside when a man suddenly turned into the vestibule from the sidewalk, opened the door with a key, scarcely giving Lora a glance, and bounced in out of the cold and up the stairs. Her toe on the sill kept the door from reaching its catch, and when a minute or two had passed she pushed it open and entered. The hall was warm and pleasant, and she stood by the radiator and rubbed her numbed fingers a moment before going upstairs, two flights, to where a door at the front was marked Kadish. Here she repeated the performance of the vestibule; over and over she rang the bell, and could hear its faint jingle from inside, but without result. She kept it up. Finally a door across the hall suddenly opened and a woman’s head appeared. “They’re not at home,” the woman snapped. “Thanks,” said Lora, “do you know where they went?”
“No.”
“All right, I’ll wait.”
The woman looked at her suspiciously and shut the door with a bang. Lora went and sat on the top step of the stairs, opening her coat and taking off her gloves. Her watch said nine o’clock.
She sat there two hours. Now and then she would get up and go to the door and ring the bell and then go back and sit down again. Several times, on the stairs and in the hall below, she heard people entering or leaving; twice she straightened, expectant, when the footsteps continued up the second flight, but the first time it was a man with a dog and the second a woman and a little girl; she sat close to the wall to let them pass on the narrow stairs. Others passed her on their way down from the flats above; once two young couples, laughing and talking, who seemed not even to see her, and one of the young men stepped on the edge of her coat, though she had pulled it as far out of the way as possible. The hall was hot and her head ached, but her feet felt cold. She was thirsty. She had just looked at her watch for the hundredth time—it was a little after eleven—and decided to ring the bell across the hall and ask for a drink of water, when they came. There was the now familiar sound of the vestibule door opening and closing from below, and footsteps, but no voices, on the stairs. They rounded the first landing and continued slowly up. Lora wanted to look over the rail, but instead sat still, her chin up, scarcely breathing. They came around the second turn and there they were in front of her, without seeing her, their eyes on the steps they were climbing. Mrs. Kadish, short, solid, bundled in a thick brown fur coat, was in front. Lora got to her feet, and Mrs. Kadish stopped with a jerk and looked up at her. Behind was Leah, the baby in her arms wrapped in an embroidered wool blanket which Lora had never seen before.
“Don’t you know it’s after eleven o’clock?” Lora snapped. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Have you fed him?”
The two women stood looking up at her, apparently too dumbfounded to reply. Slowly Mrs. Kadish turned to look at her daughter. “It’s her, is it Leah?” she asked. Then she looked up again. “Get out of my house!” she said; the words rattled out of her like pebbles.
“You old fool,” said Lora. “Come, Leah, give him to me.”
Leah pushed up, shoving her mother from behind, and they ascended the few remaining steps to the landing, while Lora stepped back to give them room, stopping with her back against their door. With an effort she kept back, and kept her hands down; she didn’t like the look in Leah’s eyes.
“Give him to me,” she repeated.
Leah, her arms folded tightly around the bundle, seemed to speak without moving her lips,
“This is not your baby. Your baby is at home.”
“That’s a lie. Don’t be silly. Give him to me.”
“I will not. This is not your baby. You are a whore and there is a devil in your womb. Maxie told me that; he said, she is a whore, Leah, and my baby must go to you, my sister, and my mother. Now we have been to the rabbi and he is our baby; you can’t have him. If you try to take him you’ll see.”
“Max never said that,” Lora declared quietly. “Everything you say is a lie.” Plainly, she thought, they were both crazy; she should have brought someone, if only Albert Scher or the taxi-driver. Then she clenched her fists as she saw the bundle twisting around in Leah’s arms; from it came a whimper, then a louder one, then an open-mouthed yell.
“Get out of here, get away from our door,” said Mrs. Kadish. She took a step forward, so that scarcely a foot separated them, but fell back again, startled by a sudden blaze in Lora’s eyes. Leah too retreated; Lora’s tone was furious and threatening:
“So that’s it! You had him circumcised, did you! When you said rabbi I didn’t think—of course that’s it! Letting a dirty old man cut him with his filthy hands—I’ll have you arrested—you’ll go to prison, both of you—my god, you took him to a rabbi to be circumcised—here, Morris darling, baby darling, here you are, I’ll bet it hurts, of course it hurts, doesn’t it? All right, it’s Mother, darling.”
The baby, still yelling, was in Lora’s arms, without anyone knowing precisely how it had got there. Leah, whose face a moment before had seemed darkly and dangerously menacing, now looked merely foolish; her mother spoke in a confused torrent of indignation and dismay, shouting above the yells from the baby:
“That is not so! When you say the rabbi’s hands are filthy it is not so and God will punish you! Anyway if a thousand rabbis’ hands was filthy who would that send to prison? I ask you, in this country do they put you in prison for dirty hands? It was the truth Leah spoke, my Maxie said it, you are a whore, Miss Winter!”
“Sh-sh-sh, all right, darling, all right, sh-sh-sh!”
The yells became again a whimper, then that too ceased.
“Be quiet, Momma,” Leah was saying. “She wouldn’t have us arrested, be quiet. Listen, Miss Winter.” She put her hand on Lora’s arm and her voice trembled. “Let us have him. You don’t care, you don’t love him. I thought you wouldn’t care. You’ve got two more and soon you’ve got another one. Momma and me, we haven’t got anything since Maxie died. Please let us have him.” Two big tears came out of the corners of her eyes and zig-zagged down her cheeks, more followed, and she wiped them off with her hand, leaving wide marks clear to her ears. “For God’s sake, Miss Winter, please let us have him.” More tears came, and her voice broke. She got out, “Maxie didn’t call you a whore,” and then buried her face in her hands.
“I’m sorry,” Lora said. She moved to the head of the stairs, around Mrs. Kadish, who didn’t budge, and the baby whimpered a little. “Sh-sh-sh, all right, darling. I’m sorry. I’ll send the blanket back tomorrow, I need it now to keep him warm. You hurt him, damn it. If there’s an infection or anything I will have you arrested, both of you, and the rabbi too, so you’d better tell him to pray.”
Halfway down the first flight she called up, “I’m sorry, Leah. Goodbye.”
There was no reply; but when she got to the lower hall Mrs. Kadish’s voice, indignant, suddenly came from above:
“Wait a minute! Miss Winter! What about the money? The money Leah left—eighty-seven dollars—”
She shouted up, “Send the clothes back and I’ll send the money.”
“Wait a minute! You can take—”
The banging door ended it. Lora, in the outer vestibule, got her coat buttoned and her gloves on. The air was so cold it pinched her nose. She had to go to Eighth Avenue to find a taxi, and then it stopped so far from the curb that she slipped and nearly fell making the step.
“I’m sorry,” said the driver, “I didn’t see you had a baby.”
“You’re half blind as it is, I’ve got two,” she laughed.
“Nuts,” he said cheerfully, putting in the gear.
It was well past midnight when she got home and found Hilda seated at the dining-table with her head pillowed on her arm, sound asleep, an enormous piece of brown Swedish bread with a thick layer of butter clutched tightly in her hand.
That was the twelfth of December. On January sixteenth, missing Panther’s anniversary by just three days, she had Lewis Kane’s son, de luxe, in a commodious corner room of the Poole Hospital, with two special nurses and nine vases of flowers. She counted them many times in between the pains. The nurse in charge of vital statistics was somewhat bewildered; the information given did not seem to fit the mother’s competent and business-like assumption of her position and its responsibilities. What were things coming to, she wondered indignantly, if the unmarried ones were going to act like veterans, without shame and without remorse? She couldn’t help admiring Lora, but didn’t like her at all.
Lewis Kane did not come to the hospital. His first sight of his son Julian was at the age of ten days, in the apartment on Seventy-first Street. The new crib was in Lora’s bedroom, against the wall where the bureau had been; she sat in an easy chair by the window wearing a pale green negligee, a book in her lap and a tea-tray on a little table at her side.
“You know,” said Lewis, touching the tiny sleeping infant with a fearful and reluctant finger, “I believe that with George and Julia I felt unconsciously, even at the time, that they were not mine. Perhaps I imagine it, but this one does seem different. I suppose you are right to stay on here for the present; May should not be too early for the country, that will be only three months. I’m glad your milk is adequate; you don’t overlook anything, do you? The whole thing is very satisfactory, very.”
He turned and approached her.
“I believe I will have a cup of tea after all.”