Even stranger it was to see the child; to be able to look at him all he pleased, and to speak to him, and to hold him in his arms! He was as beautiful as Thyrsis could have wished, and the father had no trouble at all in being interested in him; his smiles were things to make the angels jealous. Thyrsis would push his carriage out into the park, and they would sit upon a bench and gaze at him--each making sure that the other had missed none of his fine points. He was beginning to make sounds now, and had achieved the word “puss-ée”. This originally had signified the woolly kitten he carried with him, but now by a metonymy it had come to include all kinds of living things; and great was the delight of the parents when a big red automobile flashed past, and the baby pointed his finger, exclaiming gleefully, “Puss-ée!” It is an astonishing thing, how little it takes to make parents happy; regarded, purely as an abstract proposition, it would be difficult to explain why two people who possessed between them a total of sixty-four teeth, more or less, should have been so much excited by the discovery that the baby had four. But parenthood, as Thyrsis found, meant more than charming baby-prattle and the counting of teeth. Little Cedric’s tiny fingers were twisted in his heart-strings--he loved him with a love the intensity of which frightened him when he realized it. And sometimes things went wrong, and then with a pang as from the stab of a knife would come the thought that he might some day lose this child. So much pain and toil a child cost, so much it took of one’s strength and power; and then, such a fragile thing it was--exposed to so many perils and uncertainties, to the ravages of so many diseases, that struck like a cruel enemy in the dark! Corydon and Thyrsis were so ignorant--they were like children themselves; and where should they turn for knowledge? There were doctors, of course; but this took so much money--and even with all the doctors, see how many babies died! Thyrsis was learning the bitter truth of Bacon’s saying about “giving hostages to fortune.” And dearly as he loved the child, the artist in him cried out against these ties. Where now was that care-free outlook, that recklessness, that joy in life as a spectacle, which made up so much of the artist’s attitude? When one had a wife and child one no longer enjoyed tragedies--one lived, them; and one got from them, not _katharsis_, but exhaustion. One became timid and cautious and didactic, and other inartistic things. One learned that life was real, life was earnest, and the grave was not its goal!