Baltazar sat between Mrs. Jackman and the lady from Russia. At first he felt somewhat embarrassed, even dazed. He had not conversed with intelligent women since his flight from England. Even in his brave University days, his scholarly habits had precluded him from mingling much in the general society of Cambridge. Now the broad feminine outlook somewhat mystified him. The vital question which once was referred to in bated breath as the Social Evil, cropped up, he knew not how. His two neighbours talked across him with a calm frankness that rendered him speechless. He looked around the table, apprehensive lest the two young girls might be overhearing the conversation. Their mother did not seem to care in the least. She quoted statistics in a loud, clear voice. The Red Cross lady sketched conditions in Russia. The question was suddenly put to him: What about China? The fifty-year-old child of a forgotten day caught at the opening and talked hurriedly. He had lived in the heart of old China, mainly an agricultural population, a more or less moral, ancestor-fearing and tradition-bound welter of humanity. There was much to be said for old China, in spite of the absence of elementary ideas of sanitation and the ignorance of the new-fangled Western science of eugenics. Even now girl children’s feet were being bound. The ladies followed his desperate red herring and began a less alarming argument on infant welfare. When pressed for his opinion, he said: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a baby at close quarters. I don’t remember ever having touched one. I have it on hearsay that the proper thing to do is to prod a baby’s cheek with the tip of your finger, which you wipe surreptitiously on your trousers. But I haven’t done it. I know nothing at all about ’em. In fact, your proposition that babies are an important part of the body politic has never occurred to me. In prolific China babies spring up like weeds, unregarded. Some of them die, some of them live. And the living are for the most part weeds too. One gets used there to an almost animal conception of the phenomena of life and death. I’m learning all sorts of things, getting all sorts of new points of view. Just see if I’m right. Modern Europe isn’t China. Even before the war, the birth-rate was a matter of anxiety. Now Europe, de-populated of her male youth, is in a desperate quandary. Every baby is a priceless asset to the race. Lord!” said he, pushing spoon and fork abruptly together on his plate, “I never thought of it. I must appear to you like a fellow on a great Cunarder, proclaiming his discovery of America. But the discovery is there all the same. The idea never entered my head till this minute. Everybody’s got to produce babies as fast as they can, and everybody’s sacred duty is to see that they live and thrive and become potential parents of more healthy babies. That’s the proposition, isn’t it?”