And she turned him over.

‘Incredible bungler!’ said the eyes of the nurse.  ’Can’t she turn him over neater than that?’

‘Harridan!’ said the eyes of Mrs Blackshaw.  ’I wouldn’t let you bath him for twenty thousand pounds!’

Roger continued to breathe hard, as if his mother were a horse and he were rubbing her down.

‘Now!  Zoop!  Whup!’ cried his mother, and having deprived him of his final rag, she picked him up and sat him in the bath, and he was divinely happy, and so were the women.  He appeared a gross little animal in the bath, all the tints of his flesh shimmering under the electric light.  His chest was superb, but the rolled and creased bigness of his inordinate stomach was simply appalling, not to mention his great thighs and calves.  The truth was, he had grown so that if he had been only a little bit bigger, he would have burst the bath.  He resembled an old man who had been steadily eating too much for about forty years.

His two womenfolk now candidly and openly worshipped him, forgetting sectarian differences.

And he splashed.  Oh! he splashed.  You see, he had learnt how to splash, and he had certainly got an inkling that to splash was wicked and messy.  So he splashed—­in his mother’s face, in Emmie’s face, in the fire.  He pretty well splashed the fire out.  Ten minutes before, the bedroom had been tidy, a thing of beauty.  It was now naught but a wild welter of towels, socks, binders—­ peninsulas of clothes nearly surrounded by water.

Finally his mother seized him again, and, rearing his little legs up out of the water, immersed the whole of his inflated torso beneath the surface.

‘Hallo!’ she exclaimed.  ‘Did the water run over his mouf?  Did it?’

‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!  How clumsy she is!’ commented the eyes of Emmie.

‘There!  I fink that’s about long enough for this kind of wevver,’ said the mother.

’I should think it was!  There’s almost a crust of ice on the water now!’ the nurse refrained from saying.

And Roger, full of regrets, was wrenched out of the bath.  He had ceased breathing hard while in the water, but he began again immediately he emerged.

‘We don’t like our face wiped, do we?’ said his mother on his behalf.  ’We want to go back into that bath.  We like it.  It’s more fun than anything that happens all day long!  Eh?  That old dandruff’s coming up in fine style.  It’s a-peeling off like anything.’

And all the while she wiped him, patted eau de Cologne into him with the flat of her hand, and rubbed zinc ointment into him, and massaged him, and powdered him, and turned him over and over and over, till he was thoroughly well basted and cooked.  And he kept on breathing hard.

Then he sneezed, amid general horror!

‘I told you so!’ the nurse didn’t say, and she rushed to the bed where all the idol’s beautiful, clean, aired things were lying safe from splashings, and handed a flannel shirt, about two inches in length, to Mrs Blackshaw.  And Mrs Blackshaw rolled the left sleeve of it into a wad and stuck it over his arm, and his poor little vaccination marks were hidden from view till next morning.  Roger protested.