Clerambault had been so absorbed by his struggles that he had not seen Aline for months, and had therefore been unable to follow the change in her mood.  Rosine might have spoken of it before him, but he had paid no attention.  Within the last twenty-four hours he had heard in quick succession of the birth of the baby and of the fact that Aline’s husband was missing, like Maxime, and he immediately pictured to himself the suffering of the young mother.  He thought of her as he had always known her—­vibrating between pleasure and pain, but always feeling the latter more keenly, giving herself up to it, and even when she was happy, finding reasons for distress.  She was violent too, bitter, agitated, fighting against fate, and apt to be vexed with everyone around her.  He was not sure that she was not angry with him personally, on account of his ideas about reconciliation now that she must be breathing out vengeance.  He knew that his attitude was a scandal in the family, and that no one would be less disposed to tolerate it than Aline.  But no matter how she received him, he felt that he must go to her and help her in any way that his affection could suggest.  Expecting a storm, but resigned to it, he climbed up the stairs and rang the bell at his niece’s door.

He found her lying in bed with the infant, which she had had placed by her side.  She looked calm and young, with a sweet expression of beaming happiness on her face.  She was like the blooming older sister of the tiny baby, at whom she looked with adoring laughter, as he lay there waving his little spidery legs, his mouth open, hardly alive as yet, still dreaming of the dark warm place from which he had come.  She greeted Clerambault with a cry of triumph: 

“Oh, Uncle dear, how sweet of you to come!  Do look at him!  Did you ever see such a darling?”

She was so proud of her wonderful masterpiece that she was positively grateful to anyone who would look at him.  Clerambault had never seen her so pretty and so sweet.  He hardly saw the child, though he went through all the antics that politeness required, making inarticulate admiring noises which the mother expected and snapped up like a bird.  He saw only her happy face, her lovely smiling eyes, and heard her charming childish laughter.  How good it is to see anyone so happy!  All the things that he had come prepared to say to her went clean out of his head—­all useless and out of place.  The only thing necessary was to gaze on the infant wonder, and share the delight of the hen over her chick, joining in her delicious cluck of innocent vanity.

The shadow of the war, however, did pass before his eyes for a moment, the thought of the brutal, useless carnage, the dead son, the missing husband; and as he bent over the child he could not help thinking with a sad smile: 

“Why bring children into the world, if it is to butcher them like this?  I wonder what will happen to this poor little chap twenty years hence?”