When Margaret returned to the bench, if indeed she did, Peter had gone. He saw her once weeks afterwards at a distance, but they never talked again. This time it was Peter who did the blushing for the more he thought about the whole business the more degraded he found himself. He had come within at least an appreciable distance of selling his soul for a colic cure. A disgusting snip of a person had moved between him and those bitter but glamorous memories of Maria Algarez. Maybe Maria did ruin all his hope of happiness and yet he knew that but for Maria he would never have made up enough ground in his pursuit of life to learn the great truth that propriety is one of the vices. CHAPTER XII Pat grew but it was slow work. Kate would speak of an ounce as if it were some silver trophy which the child had won. Like Samuel Butler her admiration was unbounded for the intelligence which manifested itself in the process of developing bone and muscle and tissue. Peter was not inclined to give the child any credit for this. If you poured water on a lawn, grass sprang up. All the credit belonged to the gardener and Pat became bigger and bigger through no obvious efforts of his own but merely because Peter and Kate plied him with milk and sometimes carrots. Raising grass was easier. The gardener didn't have to deal with a moving target and he could administer water quite irrespective of the wishes of the grass. Of course, there were moments when Pat displayed intelligence but it was of the most rudimentary sort. When he was about six months old Peter found that if he put a finger in front of him Pat would try to bite it. Sometimes he laughed but only at his own jokes. At seven months he began to crawl. This was moderately interesting but it doubled Peter's Sunday responsibilities and even affected his literary style. Short paragraphs appeared more frequently than ever before in the Looking Them Over column. Longer flights were subject to interruption as Peter had to put Pat away from places such as the steam radiator or the gas logs. It was no longer even possible to leave safety razor blades about. Eventually somebody told Peter to buy a stockade and he did so. The arrangement was a collapsible fence which could be set up in the middle of the floor to imprison the child and curtail its wanderings. The only trouble lay in the fact that it was much too collapsible. In a month or so Pat was able to pull himself to his feet by holding on to the rail and after a few violent tugs the whole contraption would come down on top of him.