It seemed very large, out of all proportion to the small and exquisitely dainty mother.  She was short and small, and the child really, as I looked at it, seemed to be quite half the length of her own body.

“What a big boy he is,” remarked Morley.

“Yes, isn’t he?” said the mother proudly.

The baby roared its loudest, tears streamed down its scarlet face, and it dug its clenched knuckles furiously into its eyes.

“Surely it’s in pain,” I suggested.

“Oh, he always cries when he is woken up,” returned the mother tranquilly.  She did not seem to take the least notice of the child’s bellowing.  She might have been deaf for all the effect it had upon her.  She stood there placidly holding it, though it seemed very heavy for her, while the child screamed itself purple.  She began a conversation with Morley just precisely as if the child were non-existent.

I never saw such a picture, and it struck me suddenly I should like to paint it, just as it was there, and call the thing “Maternity.”

But no.  What would be the good?  No one, certainly not the British public, would ever believe its truth.

They would think it a joke, and a grotesque one at that.  “Beauty and the Beast” would do for a name, I mused, or “Fact and Fancy.”

Nothing could be more delicately soul-absorbingly beautiful than the mother; nothing so brutally hideous as the child.

Suzee had sat down on the floor now, and the baby, still roaring, had rolled on to its face on the ground beside her.  Still she took not the smallest notice of it; she laid one shapely hand on the small of its back, as if to make sure it was there, and continued her conversation tranquilly with Morley.  How she could hear what he said I could not tell.  I could hear nothing but the appalling row the child made.

“Do take it away,” I said after a few moments more, in an interval of yells, during which the baby rolled, apparently in the last stages of suffocation, on the floor.  “I can’t stand that noise.”

“Ah!” said Suzee meditatively, lifting her glorious almond eyes to mine, “you do not like my boy-baby?”

“I do not like the noise he makes,” I said evasively, “and I don’t think he can be well, either.”

“Oh yes, he is quite well,” she returned composedly; “but I will take him away.”

So saying, she began to haul at the loose things about the child’s waist, as a tired gardener hauls at a sack of potatoes prior to lifting it up.

I thought really she would get the child into her arms head downwards, so carelessly did she seem to manage it, and as she rose and carried it to the door it seemed as if the awkward weight of it must strain her own slight body.

When the curtain closed behind her and the screams got faint in the distance as the unhappy child was hauled to a back room, I drew a breath of relief and began to drink my tea, which really hitherto I had been too nervous to do.  Morley chuckled and remarked: