Section 2. Before she left the city Corydon had taken the baby to consult a famous “child-specialist”--at five dollars per consultation; she had received the dreadful tidings that Cedric was threatened with the “rickets”. So she had come out to the country with one mighty purpose in her soul. “Under-nourishment”, the doctor had said; and he had laid out a regular schedule. Six times daily the unhappy infant was to be fed; and each time some elaborate concoction had to be got ready--practically nothing could be eaten in a state of nature. The first meal would consist of, say a poached egg on a piece of toast, and the juice of an orange, with the seeds carefully excluded; the next of some chicken broth with a cracker or two, and the pulp of prunes with the skins removed; the next of some beef chopped up and pounded to a pulp and broiled, together with a bit of mashed potato or some other cooked vegetable; the next of some gruel, with cream and sugar, and some more prunes. And these operations, of course, took the greater part of Corydon’s day; she would struggle at them until she was ready to drop, and when she had to give up they would fall to Thyrsis. Some of them fell to him quite frequently--for instance, the pounding of the meat. It had to have all the fat and gristle carefully cut out; and there had to be a clean board, and a clean hammer, both of which must be scraped and washed afterwards; and whenever by any chance Corydon let the meat stay on the fire a second too long, so that it got hard, the whole elaborate operation had to be gone over again--was not the baby’s life at stake? It was quite vain for him to protest as to the pains that Corydon took to remove every tiniest fragment of the skin of a stewed prune. “Surely, dearest,” he would argue, “the internal arrangements of a baby are not so delicate as to be torn by a tiny bit of prune-skin!” But to Corydon the internal arrangements of babies were mysterious things--to be understood only by a child-specialist at five dollars per visit. “He told me what to do,” she would say; “and I am going to do it.” So she would prepare the concoctions, and would sit and feed them to the baby, spoonful by spoonful; and long after the little one had been stuffed to the bursting-point, she would hold the spoon poised in front of its mouth, making tentative passes, and seeking by some device to cajole the mouth into opening and admitting one last morsel of the precious nutriment. The child had a word of its own inventing, wherewith it denoted things that were good to eat. “Hee, gubum, gubum!” he would exclaim; and Corydon would hold the spoon and repeat “Gubum, gubum,”--long after the baby had begun to sputter and gasp and make plain that it was no longer “gubum”.