Her mother came after that, almost daily for a week, and then not
so frequently. It was not necessary, for the statistics showed that
Marjorie was making progress favorably, and Mrs. Fielding was a very
busy woman. She believed in the broad life for women, and a woman
broadens her life by stepping out of the home occasionally. The home
is better for it. When the woman is not a slave to the home, the home
becomes an ennobled place, and the woman who can step out and bring back
culture and knowledge, and broader views of life and things, is the only
woman who can raise the home to the level of the man's life. Science
and system work wonders in the home, as well as in the office of the
business man.
Mrs. Fielding was not a slave to the home. I would sign her certificate
of freedom myself. Neither did she look upon Marjorie as a necessary
evil. She was glad and proud to be a mother, and she loved Marjorie, and
wished to do all that is in a mother's power for her, but she knew that
many of the old notions about babies were mistaken ideas. The incubator
itself proved that. Science and system are far more efficacious than
much of the old-fashioned granny's twaddle. With the help of educated
minds Mrs. Fielding meant to give Marjorie an ideal mother's care.
Marjorie didn't care much for the broader life herself. She was
incorrigibly like other babies. She wanted to be fed when she was
hungry, to sleep when she was sleepy, and to be loved and mothered
and petted whenever she was not hungry nor sleepy, and whatever a
nickel-plated incubator may be able to do, it is not an adept at
kissing. It may exude balmy temperature better than an old-style open
fireplace, but it is a failure at wrapping its warm, soft arms around
a baby, and pressing its cheek against a tiny, satin cheek. The very
cast-ironness of its construction prevents it from lifting the
infant high in the air until coos and crows of baby laughter tell of
unsystematic, unscientific joy. So Marjorie adopted the fly.
The fly came one day and alighted on the glass door of her crystal case
and winked its wings at her, and she blinked her eyes at it, and after
that they understood each other perfectly. It knew she wanted to be
amused, and it knew it was an amusing fellow. It had a clever trick of
shaking hands with itself under its coat tails, and as long as she knew
it, it never mentioned a statistic, and altho it walked all over the
thermostat, it disdained to look at the figures. Marjorie and the fly
became good friends. There was something very human about the fly, far
more than about the constantly passing faces of the sightseers, or
the prim, statistical nurse, or even the systematic, broadened Mrs.
Fielding, and one day it slipped into the incubator and alighted on
Marjorie's lips, and kissed her. Shortly after the scandalized nurse
assassinated the fly, and Marjorie would have mourned deeply but for a
new companion she discovered a little while afterward.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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