Then she asked if she had had a pleasant summer.  She told the nurse, in French, to show the baby to her.  Maria approached the nurse timidly.  The flannel was carefully laid aside, and the small, piteously inquiring and puzzled face, the inquiry and the bewilderment expressed by a thousand wrinkles, was exposed.  Maria looked at it with a sort of shiver.  The nurse laid the flannel apart and disclosed the tiny feet seeming already to kick feebly at existence.  The nurse said something in French which Maria could not understand.  Ida answered also in French.  Then the baby seemed to experience a convulsion; its whole face seemed to open into one gape of expostulation at fate.  Then its feeble, futile wail filled the whole room.

“Isn’t she a little darling?” asked Ida, of Maria.

“Yes’m,” replied Maria.

There was a curious air of aloofness about Ida with regard to her baby, and something which gave the impression of wistfulness.  It is possible that she was capable of wishing that she had not that aloofness.  It did not in the least seem to Maria as if it were Ida’s baby.  She had a vague impression, derived she could not tell in what manner, of a rosebud laid on a gatepost.  Ida did not seem conscious of her baby with the woodeny consciousness of an apple-tree of a blossom.  When she gazed at it, it was with the same set smile with which she had always viewed all creation.  That smile which came from without, not within, but now it was fairly tragic.

“Her name is Evelyn.  Don’t you think it is a pretty name?” asked Ida.

“Yes’m,” replied Maria.  She edged towards the door.  The nurse, tossing the wailing baby, rose and got a bottle of milk.  Maria went out.

Maria went to school the next Monday, and all the girls asked her if the baby was pretty.

“It looks like all the babies I ever saw,” replied Maria guardedly.  She did not wish to descry the baby which was, after all, her sister, but she privately thought it was a terrible sight.

Gladys Mann supported her.  “Babies do all look alike,” said she.  “We’ve had nine to our house, and I had ought to know.”

At first Maria used to dread to go home from school, on account of the baby.  She had a feeling of repulsion because of it, but gradually that feeling disappeared and an odd sort of fascination possessed her instead.  She thought a great deal about the baby.  When she heard it cry in the night, she thought that her father and Ida might have sense enough to stop it.  She thought that she could stop its crying herself, by carrying it very gently around the room.  Still she did not love the baby.  It only appealed, in a general way, to her instincts.  But one day, when the baby was some six weeks old, and Ida had gone to New York, she came home from school, and she went up to her own room, and she heard the baby crying in the room opposite.  It cried and cried, with the insistent cry of a neglected child.  Maria said to herself that she did not believe but the French nurse had taken advantage of Her absence, and had slipped out on some errand and left the baby alone.