“He’s a girl!” cried Maria in a frenzy of indignation.  “He is not a boy, he is a girl.”  She still clung desperately to Josephine’s hair, who in her turn clung to the baby-carriage.

Then Gladys came out of the house, in a miserable, thin, dirty gown, and she was Maria’s ally.

“Let that baby go!” she cried to Josephine.  She tugged fiercely at Josephine’s white skirt.

“Gladys Mann, you go right straight into the house.  What be you buttin’ in for!” screamed her mother.  “You let that girl’s hair alone.  Josephine, what you been up to.  You might have killed this baby.”

The baby screamed louder.  It wriggled around in its little, white fur nest, and stretched out imploring pink paws from which the mittens had fallen off.  Its little lace hood was awry, the pink rosette was cocked over one ear.  Maria herself began to cry.  Then Gladys waxed fairly fierce.  She paid no attention whatever to her mother.

“You jest go round an’ ketch on to the kid’s wagin,” said she, “an’ I’ll take care of her.”  With that her strong little hands made a vicious clutch at Josephine’s braids.

Maria sprang for the baby-carriage.  She straightened the lace hood, she tucked in the fur robe, and put on the mittens.  The baby’s screams subsided into a grieved whimper.  “Did great wicked girls come and plague sister’s own little precious?” said Maria.  But now she had to reckon with Gladys’s mother, who had recovered her equilibrium, lost for a second by her daughter’s manoeuvre.  She seized in her turn the handle of the baby-carriage, and gave Maria a strong push aside.  Then she looked at all three combatants, like a poor-white Solomon.

“Who were sent out with him in the first place, that’s what I want to know?” she said.

“I were,” replied Josephine in a sobbing shout.  Her head was aching as if she had been scalped.

“Shet up!” said Gladys’s mother inconsistently.

“Did your ma send her out with him?” she queried of her.

“He is not a boy,” replied Maria shiftily.

“Yes, she did,” said Josephine, still rubbing her head.

Gladys, through a wholesome fear of her mother, had released her hold on her braids, and stood a little behind.

Mrs. Mann’s scanty rough hair blew in the winter wind as she took hold of the carriage.  Maria again tucked in the white fur robe to conceal her discomfiture.  She was becoming aware that she was being proved in the wrong.

“Shet up!” said Mrs. Mann in response to Josephine’s answer.  There was not the slightest sense nor meaning in the remark, but it was, so to speak, her household note, learned through the exigency of being in the constant society of so many noisy children.  She told everybody, on general principles, to “shet up,” even when she wished for information which necessitated the reverse.