SEE," said the nurse, "Martha has the Nancy Dancy books. Did you know I helped to make them? You wouldn't suspect me of having a hand in anything literary or artistic, now, would you?"

Miss Waite's business concerned only the children of other women, but her face was that of the mother of many. My son was in her cushiony arms at the moment going to sleep over his five-ounce bottle. She pinched his inert hand, whereupon he spread his fingers, increased the slit between his eyelids by a hair's breadth, and resumed work with a tiny sigh.

"Just fancy!" said the nurse. "Me having anything to do with a book."

She said book with the reverent capitalization bestowed on literature by those who have never tried it.

"They certainly are having a great success," I said. "It's so hard to get satisfactory children's books nowadays. Everything is always eating up something else. The artists seem to love to do dragons and snakes. I suppose because they have nice lines and lend themselves to cheap color processes."

"Dear me," said the nurse, "I don't know anything about that. A picture is a picture to me, though you'd think I might have learned a little being with Mrs. Sterret a whole year."

"Were you really?" said I. "Do tell me what she is like. One hears so many queer things about famous people. Is she really such a sloven? And is it true that she turns her children over to trained nurses and hardly sees them from one year's end to another?"

Miss Waite made a ferocious little sound in her throat: "Who says that?"

"Oh," I said vaguely, "newspapers everybody."

My son was asleep invincibly. She spanked him scientifically and tickled his

neck, but he had sunk beyond reach, so she kissed the top of his head resoundingly, avoiding the fontanelle, and cuddled him to her starched white bosom.

"There's no doctor or head nurse looking," she muttered guiltily. "Oh, how I do wish you belonged to me," and she brazenly rocked him with her cheek against the warm fuzz of his head.

"As to turning her babies over to nurses," said she scornfully, "there was never but one nurse, to my knowledge, and I was the one. As to being a sloven, anybody who could do what she did and think about looks

"When I first saw her I did think she was a crank. She was so thin and sick-looking, and carelessly dressed. And her eyes had a wild look that made me suspicious. She was a sloven if you like, then. The last time I saw her she might have stepped out of a show-window on Fifth Avenue. little boy was two months old when I came to her. 'I'm so afraid of making mistakes in preparing the bottle,' said she. a-very busy woman, and my husband is not well.'

Her

"We nurses are so used to finding trouble wickedness too-where you'd least expect it that we take a skeleton in the closet as a matter of course. We know perfectly well that something unpleasant-even horrible-besides the case that brings us there, is always walking around the rooms of every house or flat where a family lives. Some ghost or goblin is sure to grin at us through a crack before we've been in a house twenty-four hours."

"There isn't one here," I said indignantly.

Miss Waite said nothing.

I thought a moment and was silent. Miss Waite continued:

"Sometimes it's rat size-sometimes only mouse. But I've seen-well-wolves and tigers. I shouldn't have said what I did if yours had been bigger than a mouse. We get so we pay no more attention to 'em than

to the family cat; do our business and go as soon as possible.

"To tell the honest truth, I thought at first she was a 'nervous case.' That's a polite word for almost or quite insane, you know. Still, she had been preparing the baby's food for a month all herself and doing it in a way I had to live up to: boric acid for the nipples, bottle brushes, cream dipper, barley-water, milk-sugar, lime-water -everything as exact and clean as a surgeon's tools. And that didn't seem like a 'nervous case.'

"I could feel her great black eyes boring through the back of my head when she showed me into this baby's pantry of hers.

"'You see,' said she in a kind of apologetic way, 'I can't intrust this sort of thing to untrained hands. I asked my second girl to put the modified milk into the baby's refrigerator, supposing she would do it at once—and found it standing beside the hot kitchen stove two hours afterward. One has to do those things one's self,' said she, 'or trust them to some one who knows how.' Then, suddenly, as I was beginning to brush the bottles, she ran out of the room, and I heard her trying not to cry. A nurse is hardened-at least accustomed-to people's crying, but this-I knew that it was because of something, because of the Thing I was speaking of that was in the house, and I knew that it must be a big one-tiger-size,

or worse.

"Not wickedness. When it's wickedness you know it because you begin to feel wicked and cynical yourself. This was big and cold and heavy, like sewer-gas, or like Did you ever see a picture of a snake twined about a branch and looking down into a bird's nest?

"'It's fear,' I said.

"And as I set my feedings away, noticing again how beautifully spick and span she had kept everything, I found I was horribly sorry. And that made me cross, for a nurse can't afford to have sympathies. This, I suppose, confused me, so that when I went to have a look at my new baby and take him his bottle I accidentally opened the wrong door. I had never seen a studio before. The light was rather dim so that I didn't see then, what was so plain afterward, that everything was just shadow-hardly more than begun. It looked as if the room

were full of children, all laughing-and fairies-well, you know those fairies in the Nancy Dancy books. But of course the drawings were all ever so much bigger than they show in the books, and mostly in color. They were dear! How could Fear be in the same house with that crowd of laughing babies? Still I heard her sobbing somewhere, and then-but it seemed as if it was all those laughing babies that made me do it-I began to cry myself. I stepped out softly and tried the next door, and there was my baby right enough, bless his heart, with his finger half-way down his throat and his eyes wide open, looking for his bottle. I took away his finger and tucked in the nipple instead, and he swallowed away like a little man, staring hard at my cap.

"It was evening when I came, so my first meal there was breakfast. As I went down

I saw a maid taking a tray to the studio door-just coffee. But the coffee they had at that house! It wasn't a beverage; it was a drug. I had to fill my cup two-thirds full of milk and then it was strong. But she took a whole breakfast-cup full-black!

"As the door opened she saw me and asked how the baby had slept. You'd have thought from her face that he was desperately ill.

6

“'Why,' said I, 'he's the wellest, fattest, dearest little thing that ever was! You're the patient,' I said. 'Does your doctor know what kind of breakfast you have?' And I pointed to the coffee.

“That isn't breakfast,' said she. 'I had my breakfast two hours ago, when Anne woke up.' Anne was her little girl. "This is just to help me about working.' She waved her hand toward the pictures, and now I saw plainly how they were really just ghosts of pictures-all cloudy masses of paint. Yet the night before they had seemed all but alive.

"I have to get past this stage, you see,' she said to me, just as if I knew about such things, and it takes whip and spur to do it. Once past the hill and the rough road, we'll get back to a more normal way of living.'

'She was drinking that terrible coffee while she talked, and by the time it was half gone the color had come into her face and her eyes were bright. I could hardly believe she was the woman I had heard crying the night before.

wouldn't let her little girl pose for her, anyway, and that even if she did it would spoil everything because the child would become self-conscious and stiff.

"I have taught my eye to remember,' she said, and she was always doing little studies of their heads while she was with them. It was the drawing of an eyelid, she told me, or the curve of a cheek or the squaring of the mouth corners when they laughed that she sketched then. 'I do that when another woman would be sewing. Of course I couldn't depend on that if I were a painter, but it's enough for the simple sort of drawings I'm making. And then I use my camera some, but really you can't get much out of a photograph; it's one way of sketching and sometimes you get an idea, but generally they're all wrong. I didn't know that when I started out. I thought my photographs were lovely and that all I should have to do would be to copy them line for line. But when I began to work from them they seemed to crumble into dust.'

"That's the way she put it. I didn't understand then, and I don't now. She had some of the loveliest photographs of her babies that I've ever seen. But they didn't suit her.

"Her camera was a wonderful little thing and I believe very expensive. She could take snaps in-doors if it was moderately light, and she was always gunning after little Anne's smiles, which were rarer than they might have been, for the child was fretting over her last molars and running a temperature and crying at night. It was better after I got her to come to me-but it took a long time. Queer child. Not everybody liked her. 'It's for my rubber stamp,' Mrs. Sterret explained to me one day after shooting off a dozen exposures at Anne. I noticed she always faced her camera toward the sun, and thought it odd, because the directions tell you not to do that. It's prettiest,' said she, 'when they are almost in silhouette with the sun on their hair and drawing a line of light around their profiles. You get an effect of sun that way that you can't in any other.'

"I asked her what she meant by 'rubber stamp.'

""The rubber-stamp artist,' said she, 'is the one that makes the most money. You

do a certain kind of picture-one subject done in one way, all the time-enough different so you can tell them apart, that's all. This is the greatest of the rubber-stamp artists,' said she, pulling out a portfolio. She spread out a lot of magazine covers. 'You could almost superimpose one profile on another. All that's different is the hats; the girls all droop their eyelids and part their lips and hold their chins in the air. I'm told he gets three hundred dollars for each of them.'

"It didn't seem possible they could be worth that, but I did think them pretty and to be honest I had to say so, though I could see she didn't.

"'Of course you do,' said she. 'Everybody thinks so except artists. That's the rubber stamp. Now, here's another portfolio. It's hardly fair to call it rubberstamp work; at least it's a much better one than the other, and I've learned ever so much from her. Children, you see; and they are children. She knows how to keep things simple. She uses a clean strong line, and you'd never mistake her work for anybody else's. That's where the stamp comes. But her children are always solemn and quiet. Mine are to be always in sunshine and always laughing and wriggling. That's my rubber stamp-that— and keeping them in flat light grays—not much line.'

"Well, it seemed to me she was getting it; only-it was always one new drawing after another. At first glance you'd think, 'How perfectly lovely!'-then there'd seem to be nothing there. Just nothing at all.

"I'm not ready yet to finish,' she said once, reading my look, I suppose. 'It's the hardest part I'm doing now-composition and tone, making maps of the masses of light and shade as we used to do maps of the States at school. Finishing won't be hard once I'm ready.'

"But I couldn't help being uneasy; perhaps because I saw she was uneasy herself. What if the finishing might not be so easy, after all? But then, what did I know? I took the children out and kept them away all day as much as I could, and took them both at night. She had been taking Anne at night, molars and all. I don't know when she had slept. And the baby only two months old! Think of it! No wonder she couldn't nurse him.

bolic to his face. He had a room at the top of the house and took his air on the roof and isolated himself with all sorts of necessary and unnecessary precautions. I wanted to do something for him, too, but he seemed to be afraid that I'd somehow carry tuberculosis from him to the children if I did; so when I saw it worried him I kept away. He was almost frantic on the subject and martyrized himself almost as much as that poor leper they made such a fuss about.

But I finally persuaded him it was perfectly safe to bring the baby up to the roof for its airing when he was there, and it did him a world of good. And I told him of all T'b's I had known who got perfectly well and how autopsies almost always show scars on the lungs, so that he brightened up to be almost human after a few days. He had a little insurance, it seemed, so wasn't so worried about his dying as Mrs. Sterret was. She preferred him alive.

"One day I met Mr. Sterret's physician coming down. He was a personal friend,

palm and went to the window, glaring out as though some pet case were going against him. How does she eat and sleep?' he asked, without turning around. I told him.

""Don't you think that you, as a woman, might bring Mrs. Sterret to her senses and show her that she is throwing away her husband's life and her children's bread and butter by this madness? That a woman should think of a career under such circumstances!' he said.

"Oh,' I said, 'it's not that. Oh, how can you think so? She knows the money is going and she hopes to earn enough by her drawings to support them all and to go South before it is too late for her husband.'

"There was enough,' said the physician, 'when she began. Why, she must have spent five hundred on her camera alone in the past year; and now she's got you. There's no money in art or writing except at the top. I know a lot of those people and they all say so. And she has had hardly