The baby could sit up now, propped against pillows. It was fat and well. It had pallid skin and red blond hair. Its heavy cheeks hung forward and between them was sunk its droll, loose mouth, very red and wet. Its very blue eyes conveyed neither pleasure, surprise, nor recognition as yet, but it showed anger, and even delight, with its hands and arms and its body, that was long with fat bowed legs. It liked best to sit in the bath, its weak back supported by its grandmother's hand, and strike the clear green surface of the water with its stiff outspread palm. Laurence never, in his heart, admitted a relation with the baby. The child disconcerted him. He was ashamed of his intimacy with it, and that it took him for granted. When he leaned toward it, it held out its fat arms with their creased wrists, and went to him. It sat unsteadily on his knee. The blond hair on its head was furry and lustrous and grew down the flat length of its skull at the back into the thick fold of its neck. As it moved its body its head bobbled as though it were about to topple off. When Laurence touched the baby's delicate skin he found it always damp with a cold fragrant sweat, and if he pressed the flesh it mottled with color, like a bruise. With an eager, half-directed gesture, it would reach out and clutch his watch chain. It liked to jerk and dangle the chain. Sometimes Laurence teased it and it fretted. Laurence said that the baby was stupid. "Of course he can't know you! He's only four months old!" Mrs. Farley defended indignantly. Laurence sentimentalized his mother's devotion to the baby, but that did not alter his own reaction. The child made no appeal to him. He gave it back to the grandmother. He did not want it near him for long at a time. Occasionally when he leaned over the carriage and let its fingers stray through his stiff, gray-sprinkled hair, he lost himself in the feeble touch of its hands. It knew nothing. It did not care. It was almost as if it loved him without knowing him, and somehow he wanted to be loved like that. It relieved him of himself. "Eh, you little beggar!" he would exclaim, floundering with the foolish word, and he would shake its clutching finger roughly. As the baby stared at him, it made a happy sound. Its soul, sweet and a little blank, lay on the surface of its eyes, and there was something awesome in its stupid naked little looks, among the grown people who had forgotten how to be naked like that even with themselves. Laurence flushed and his eyes dimmed with emotion. The softness and helplessness of the baby took his male self. He wanted to do something for it. He could not even buy it a sweet. "Poor little thing! Poor little thing!" he murmured to himself. However, the definiteness of his responsibility toward it was a relief to him in the unsettled state of his life. * * * * *