“Lots of people have come to see you, haven’t they?” Carol hinted.

“Why, Bea’s cousin Tina comes in right along, and the foreman at the mill, and——­Oh, we have good times.  Say, take a look at that Bea!  Wouldn’t you think she was a canary-bird, to listen to her, and to see that Scandahoofian tow-head of hers?  But say, know what she is?  She’s a mother hen!  Way she fusses over me—­way she makes old Miles wear a necktie!  Hate to spoil her by letting her hear it, but she’s one pretty darn nice—­nice——­Hell!  What do we care if none of the dirty snobs come and call?  We’ve got each other.”

Carol worried about their struggle, but she forgot it in the stress of sickness and fear.  For that autumn she knew that a baby was coming, that at last life promised to be interesting in the peril of the great change.

CHAPTER XX

I

The baby was coming.  Each morning she was nauseated, chilly, bedraggled, and certain that she would never again be attractive; each twilight she was afraid.  She did not feel exalted, but unkempt and furious.  The period of daily sickness crawled into an endless time of boredom.  It became difficult for her to move about, and she raged that she, who had been slim and light-footed, should have to lean on a stick, and be heartily commented upon by street gossips.  She was encircled by greasy eyes.  Every matron hinted, “Now that you’re going to be a mother, dearie, you’ll get over all these ideas of yours and settle down.”  She felt that willy-nilly she was being initiated into the assembly of housekeepers; with the baby for hostage, she would never escape; presently she would be drinking coffee and rocking and talking about diapers.

“I could stand fighting them.  I’m used to that.  But this being taken in, being taken as a matter of course, I can’t stand it—­and I must stand it!”

She alternately detested herself for not appreciating the kindly women, and detested them for their advice:  lugubrious hints as to how much she would suffer in labor, details of baby-hygiene based on long experience and total misunderstanding, superstitious cautions about the things she must eat and read and look at in prenatal care for the baby’s soul, and always a pest of simpering baby-talk.  Mrs. Champ Perry bustled in to lend “Ben Hur,” as a preventive of future infant immorality.  The Widow Bogart appeared trailing pinkish exclamations, “And how is our lovely ’ittle muzzy today!  My, ain’t it just like they always say:  being in a Family Way does make the girlie so lovely, just like a Madonna.  Tell me—­” Her whisper was tinged with salaciousness—­“does oo feel the dear itsy one stirring, the pledge of love?  I remember with Cy, of course he was so big——­”

“I do not look lovely, Mrs. Bogart.  My complexion is rotten, and my hair is coming out, and I look like a potato-bag, and I think my arches are falling, and he isn’t a pledge of love, and I’m afraid he will look like us, and I don’t believe in mother-devotion, and the whole business is a confounded nuisance of a biological process,” remarked Carol.