"Very well! let them go hungry, but let the principle of artificial nursing be respected. Everything depends on that. I don't wish to have to tell you so again. Send away those horrible nurses. For bringing up our children we have goat's milk and cow's milk in a great emergency; but I can't concede anything beyond that." He added, with his apostolic air: "We are here to demonstrate a grand philanthropic idea. It must triumph, even at the cost of some sacrifices. Look to it." Pondevez did not insist. After all, it was a good place, near enough to Paris to permit descents upon Nanterre from the Quarter on Sunday, or a visit by the manager to his favorite breweries. Madame Polge--whom Jenkins always called "our intelligent overseer," and whom he had in fact placed there to oversee everything, the manager first of all--was not so austere as her duties would lead one to believe, and readily yielded to the charm of a _petit verre_ or two of "right cognac," or to a game of bezique for fifteen hundred points. So he dismissed the nurses and tried to harden himself against whatever might happen. What did happen? A genuine Massacre of the Innocents. So that the few parents who were possessed of any means at all, mechanics or tradesmen of the faubourgs, who had been tempted by the advertisements to part with their children, speedily took them away, and there remained in the establishment only the wretched little creatures picked up under porches or in the fields, or sent by the hospitals, and doomed from their birth to all manner of ills. As the mortality constantly increased, even that source of supply failed, and the omnibus that had departed at full speed for the railway station returned as light and springy as an empty hearse. How could that state of affairs last? How long would it take to kill off the twenty-five or thirty little ones who were left? That is what the manager, or, as he had christened himself, the register of deaths, Pondevez, was wondering one morning after breakfast, as he sat opposite Madame Polge's venerable curls, taking a hand at that lady's favorite game. "Yes, my dear Madame Polge, what is to become of us? Things cannot go on long like this. Jenkins won't give in, the children are as obstinate as mules. There's no gainsaying it, they'll all pass out of our hands. There's that little Wallachian--I mark the king, Madame Polge--who may die any minute. Poor little brat, just think, it's three days since anything went into his stomach. I don't care what Jenkins says; you can't improve children, like snails, by starving them. It's a distressing thing not to be able to save a single one. The infirmary hasn't unlimited capacity. In all earnestness this is a pitiful business. Bezique, forty." Two strokes of the bell at the main entrance interrupted his monologue. The omnibus was returning from the station and its wheels ground into the gravel in unaccustomed fashion.