Then she wouldn't be afraid any more. Disencumbered, her strength restored, she would be wholly able to take care of herself and her child. She could earn two livings. She knew precisely how to go about it. There was nothing haphazard in her plans. Either she would promptly find another first class secretarial position or else she would go into business on her own hook, get a small room about eight feet by eight, at $1.50 or $1.75 a square foot, in a big office building and put on the door G. CONNOR STENOGRAPHER--COURT REPORTER NOTARY PUBLIC She could see it in her mind's eye. It looked fine. But it was several months off yet, slow months of discomfort, culminating in hours of the acutest agony a human being can suffer and live. She knew. She had been through it once already. But she would never go through it again, after this time. Never. They might say what they liked about race suicide, this was the last for her. In the meantime she must keep Jim as straight as possible and get all she could out of him. For presently there would be some heavy bills to pay. She kissed and flattered him, and went through his pockets at night, racing the bartenders for his money. Wasn't a business woman a big fool, she often asked herself, to get in this fix for a man she didn't love? The Church--the Church took a pretty theoretical view of some things. XXVIII ALBERT TALBOT CONNOR When her grandson was eight days old, Mrs. Talbot took him to be baptized. Georgia, not yet out of bed, protested against the precipitancy, but her mother was armored in shining faith and prevailed. "You know your baby's sickly," she explained, "and not doing well. We cannot afford to take any chances--in case anything happened." So she dressed up the mite in his best white lace, and herself in her best black silk and sailed off to church in a closed carriage. He was named Albert Talbot. Until he was brought back to her, Georgia felt savagely that there was something ridiculously primitive, something almost grotesque in the proceeding. To take her baby from her, she could hear him crying all down stairs, to a church a mile away, to be breathed on by a priest and touched with spittle and anointed with oil and wetted with water--how could such things make her perfect babe more perfect! Why should this naïve physical rite send her son to Paradise if he died; and more especially why should the lack of it bar him out of Paradise forever? It was not fair to put such mighty conditions upon him. He was only a baby. When young Albert was returned to her arms and her breast, she forgot her grievance. Anyway, he was on the safe side of baptism now. It couldn't do him any harm and it might do him an eternal and supreme good. It was better to take no chances with the supernatural. She asked the doctor when she could wean him. "I am behind in my bills, you know," she explained, "especially yours, doctor. I'd better get to work."