"I can’t bear it!—I won’t bear it!" Margot reiterated. With her tumbled hair, swollen eyes, pink uptilted nose, and the little mouth and chin that quivered with each sobbing breath intaken, she looked absurdly babyish for her twenty years, as she vowed that wild horses shouldn’t drag her to Longchamps, and railed against the injustice of Fate. "None of my married friends have had such rotten luck!" she asserted. She stamped upon the velvety carpet and flashed at Franky a glance of imperious appeal. "Not Tota Stannus, or Cynthia Charterhouse, or Joan Delabrand, or anybody! Then, why me? That’s what I want to know? After all the mascots I’ve worn and carried about with me.... Gojo and Jollikins and the jade tree-frog, and the rest! ... Every single one given me by a different woman who’d been married for years and never had a baby! This very day I’ll smash the whole lot!" "By the Great Brass Hat! ..." Franky exploded before he could stop himself, and laughed until the tears coursed down. So "Gojo," the black velvet kitten, and "Jollikins," the fat, leering, naked thing that sat and squinted over its pot-belly at its own huge, shapeless feet, and all the array of gadgets and netsukis crowding Margot’s toilette-table and _secrétaire_, down to "Pat-Pat," the bog-oak pig, and "Ti-Ti," the jade tree-frog, were so many insurances against the Menace of Maternity. By Jove! women were regular children.... And Margot ... Nothing but a baby, this poor little Margot—going, in spite of Jollikins and Gojo, to have a baby of her own. "What is one to believe? Whom is one to trust in? ..." "’Trust in.’ ... My best child, you don’t mean that you believed those women when they told you that such twopenny gadgets could work charms of—that or any other kind?" "Indeed, indeed they do! Tota Stannus was _perfectly serious_ when she came to my boudoir one night at the Club, about a week before our—the wedding.... She said—I can hear her now; ’_Well, old child, you’re to be married on Wednesday, and of course you know the ropes well enough not to want any tips from me.... Still——’_" "That wasn’t overwhelmingly flattering," Franky commented, "from a married woman twice your age. What else did she say?" "She said I must be aware," went on Margot, "that a woman who wanted to keep her friends and her figure, simply couldn’t afford to have kids." "And you——" Franky no longer battled with the grin that would have infuriated Margot. Something had wiped it from his face.