Nan, I must admit, does not help me. Perhaps some day, as I tell her, when she is tall and slender and seventeen, she will be more ready to accompany her grey father than her bonny mother; and then (if I have succeeded in living so long) I shall be in receipt of a little return for all my services to Nature. But it will be only for a brief season then, for her eyes will be beginning to wander this way and that for the comely form (as she considers it) of another of Nature's dupes, who at this moment is perhaps squealing in another awkward progenitor's arms in some other London nursery. For life, as Lacey says, is all progression, if not progress. Nan, as I say, gives me no help. There is something about my features, which are not unpleasing to many of my friends, that she finds curiously terrifying; and the more kindly disposed I am to her and beam with tenderness on her little person, the more evidently do I remind her of one of the most fearsome monsters of that mysterious nowhere from which she journeyed hither. But with her mother...! The two together make such an adorable picture that I wish I could get it painted by a worthy brush. The balance of sex wants readjusting among the representations, both in paint and in stone, of mother and child. For centuries no man of genius ever painted or graved a girl-baby at all: there might not have been such a thing in the world. In fact, if art and not biology were the evidence upon which the historian has to work, there never was a girl-baby until quite recently. It is a great pity, because this preoccupation with the boy-baby has deprived us of renderings of girl-babies which would have been exquisite beyond imagination. Think what adorable little nestling mites Luca della Robbia could have moulded, and what tiny feminine rogues Correggio would have painted! One wonders that no artist rebelled. Did none of them ever look at a family of children and think the little girls lovely? Or, against their better taste, did they merely slavishly obey tradition? CHAPTER XXXVII IN WHICH A TRYING CEREMONY GOES FOR NOTHING, AND A FATHER PUTS DOWN HIS FOOT Dollie and Ann walked in after lunch, looking, as I think now, a shade less natural than usual, but only a shade. Their visit was so remarkable that I wish to record its progress with minute accuracy. Dollie greeted us with a somewhat piano "Wow, wow!" and sat himself in the most comfortable chair. Ann took a chair by the window and asked how Lavender was, and if she might see her. Naomi went out to arrange for the display, and Dollie asked if cigarette smoke was bad for it. I asked what he meant by "it," and he said he meant Lavender, and Ann told him with some asperity that he ought to be more careful in referring to babies. She seemed more critical of him even than usual. I asked after her father, and she said he had seemed all right at breakfast. "Better than he'll be at dinner, I guess," Dollie said darkly, and Ann frowned.