Pleased though the baby was with her new powers, her life at this period was not all of placid content. Ambition had entered in. It had already seemed as if the mechanical lifting of the head was passing into real effort to raise it; and day by day the intention grew clearer, and the head was held up better. Now, too, appeared the first sign of control over the legs. Laid on her face on the lounge, the baby did not cry, but turned her head sidewise and freed her face, and at the same time propped her body with her knees. This was on the first day of the month. A few days later she was propping herself with her knees in the bath every day. With increase of joy and power came also the beginning of tears. This, too, was on the first day of the month. The tears were shed because she had waked and cried some time without being heard. When she was at last taken up, her eyes were quite wet. As every nurse knows, wee babies do not cry tears. When they do, it does not mean that any higher emotional level has been gained, only that the tear glands have begun to act. Nor have I any reason to suppose that in this case the baby felt fear at being left alone. It was simply that she was uncomfortable, and needed attention; and the attention delaying, the discomfort mounted, till it provoked stronger and stronger reflex expressions. The first fright did occur, however, a few days later in the same week; but it was in a much more primitive form than fear of solitude. The baby was lying half asleep on my lap when her tin bath was brought in and set down rather roughly, so that the handles clashed on the sides. At this she started violently, with a cry so sharp that it brought her grandfather anxiously in from two rooms’ distance; she put up her lip at the same time, with the regular crying grimace known to every nursery,--the first time she had done this,--and it was fully five minutes before her face was tranquil again. There had been reflex starting at sounds from the first week, and Professor Preyer calls this an expression of fright; but to me (and Professor Sully regards it in the same way) it seemed purely mechanical. Our baby would even start and cry out in her sleep at a sound without waking. But now there was clearly something more than reflex starting. It was not yet true fear, for fear means a sense of danger, an idea of coming harm, and the baby could have had no such idea. But there was some element of emotion to be seen, akin to fear; and (if we regard pleasure and pain as psychologists are disposed to do, not as emotions in themselves, but only as a quality of agreeableness or disagreeableness in our feelings) here was the first dawn of any emotion. Fright, that was but a step above mere physical shock, led the way into the emotional life.