Speaking as I do from experience only, perhaps I may be forgiven if I repeat myself, and beg for far more consideration for the mother than she ever gets. I hope I shall not be considered a monster if I whisper quite low that I do not believe a new baby is anything but a profound nuisance to its relations at the very first. It howls when peace is required, it demands unceasing attention, and it is thrust into Angelina’s arms, and she has to admire it and adore it at the risk of being thought most unnatural, when she really is rather resenting the intrusion, and requires at least a week to reconcile herself to her new fate. My nurse never allows _her_ baby to be a torment. Somehow she has such a pleasant way with her that babies cannot be a trouble where she is. She turns them out always as if they had just come out of a band-box, and one never realises a baby can be unpleasant so long as she has the dressing of them, and the seeing to them generally; but then she is so very methodical, so clean, so bright, so cheerful, that somehow I find, when I come to write down her method, I cannot remember so much what she did as how she did it, and that I cannot recall her routine of work half as easily as I can each detail of her neat form and _jolly_ face, and the perfect joy it was to me to have about me a woman who never fussed, never kept me waiting, always did to-day what she did yesterday at the same time, and, above all, presented me with a nice bright-looking baby to look at just when that infant was wanted, and not at inopportune moments, or just at the special moment when she would have been a worry.