The only crumple in Molly’s rose leaves was Mrs. Bishop, senior’s, views with regard to the baby. Molly had had no babies: her mother-in-law had had eight, five of whom had lived and flourished. But Molly had known other people’s babies, and had made their experience her own, so far as observation enabled her to do it, and she had read all the good writing there was on the baby question, and, as may be expected, had her views and naturally wished to carry them out in the person of her own baby. If a woman can’t do what she likes with her _own_ baby, when is she to do it? But, strange to say, the dowager, Mrs. Bishop, seemed to feel the new comer was even more Harry’s baby and her own grandchild than Molly’s child, and being her first “posterity,” she was very much interested in it, and she and Mr. Bishop had come to the Greenfield hotel in order to be at hand. Very soon Molly, with her latter-day views of baby training, and Mrs. Bishop, with her experience of eight, clashed. For days the struggle was silent, for she was Harry’s mother; and all the directions for giving anise-seed tea and gin and water, and paregoric, were quietly disregarded,—but the tug of war came when Molly refused to nurse it before the appointed hour. “And you mean to say you will not feed that little creature till the time _you_ think it needs it? Can _you_ judge of a baby’s hunger?” “Mamma, I asked the doctor to guide me, and all the best writers say”— “There it is!” cried Mrs. Bishop, triumphantly. “You are such a theorist, Molly; but you can’t bring up a child by books, and it may cost you this one’s life or health to find that out. I am surprised a woman of your sense should not see that you can’t set up your book experience against the practical knowledge of a mother of eight.” Molly made no reply: she could not be cruel enough to hint that three of the eight had died. Happily for Molly and the carrying out of her views, Mrs. Lennox, who had become a very dear friend, was with her very much, and it was her nurse, an intelligent woman, who was in attendance; and between them they had been able to save Molly much anxiety. She knew that her own orders, and no one’s else, would be carried out; this otherwise would have been a terrible anxiety; for her doctor had said to her, in one of her talks with him before the birth of the child, “Half the babies’ stomachs are ruined in the first month, and the poor baby becomes a victim to colic and indigestion through that month’s mistakes. Some babies are born to it, but these are few compared with the many that are made to suffer by bad habits.” Mrs. Bishop, senior, disapproved of the nurse, and openly derided the doctor, and audibly scorned the idea of putting a baby a fortnight old in “training” and freely told her daughter that Molly was not fit to be a mother; that she ought to have remained single and become a doctress, or screeched for woman’s rights from a platform.