As Dion had said, the baby was an ordinary baby.  “In looks,” the nurse remarked, “he favors his papa.”  Certainly in this early stage of his career the baby had little of the beauty and charm of Rosamund.  As his head was practically bald, his forehead, which was wrinkled as if by experience and the troubles of years, looked abnormally high.  His face, full of puckers, was rather red; his nose meant very little as yet; his mouth, with perpetually moving lips, was the home of bubbles.  His eyes were blue, and looked large in his extremely small countenance, which was often decorated with an expression of mild inquiry.  This expression, however, sometimes changed abruptly to a network of wrath, in which every feature, and even the small bald head, became involved.  Then the minute feet made feeble dabs, or stabs, at the atmosphere; the tiny fists doubled themselves and wandered to and fro as if in search of the enemy; and a voice came forth out of the temple, very personal and very intense, to express the tempest of the soul.

“Hark at him!” said the nurse.  “He knows already what he wants and what he don’t want.”

And Rosamund, listening as only a mother can listen, shook her head over him, trying to condemn the rage, but enjoying the strength of her child in the way of mothers, to whom the baby’s roar perhaps brings the thought, “What a fine, bold man he’ll be some day.”  If Rosamund had such a thought the nurse encouraged it with her.  “He’s got a proud spirit already, ma’am.  He’s not to be put upon.  Have his way he will, and I don’t altogether blame him.”  Nor, be sure, did Rosamund altogether blame the young varmint for anything.  Perhaps in his tiny fisticuffs and startlingly fierce cries she divined the Doric, in embryo, as it were; perhaps when “little master” shrieked she thought of the columns of the Parthenon.

But Dion told the truth to Canon Wilton when he had said that Rosamund was marvelously reasonable, so far, in her love for her baby son.  The admirable sanity, the sheer healthiness of outlook which Dion loved in her did not desert her now.  To Dion it seemed that in the very calmness and good sense of her love she showed its great depth, showed that already she was thinking of her child’s soul as well as of his little body.

Dion felt the beginnings of a change in Rosamund, but he did not find either her or himself suddenly and radically changed by the possession of a baby.  He had thought that perhaps as mother and father they would both feel abruptly much older than before, even perhaps old.  It was not so.  Often Dion gazed at the baby as he bubbled and cooed, sneezed with an air of angry astonishment, stared at nothing with a look of shallow surmise, or, composing his puckers, slept, and Dion still felt young, even very young, and not at all like a father.

“I’m sure,” he once said to Rosamund, “women feel much more like mothers when they have a baby than men feel like fathers.”