The room was dead with old air. Yet his brow burned. He flung up the window and gulped the fresh wind that flowed in. The jar of the casement shook down snow and it sifted across the sill to the carpet. On his sleeve a few flakes rested and did not melt. Their patterns caught his attention. The wonder of snow engaged his idle mind. The air had been clear. And then suddenly there was snow. Out of nothing these little masterworks of crystal jewelry had been created, infinitesimal architecture beyond the skill of the Venetian glass-spinners or the Turkish weavers of silver. And now the flakes were blinking out, back into nothingness. The snow had come from nowhere in armies. Each flake was an entity, unlike any other flake. And then the air had recalled it! This baby that was arriving was but another snowflake. It would come from nowhere—or from where? Whither would it go if it died? For die it must, sooner or later. Invisible, visible, invisible! What was the soul? what was the body? Who decreed these existences? How could any imaginable god find the time, the patience, the interest to build every snowflake, sketch every leaf, decide the race, the hue, the figure of every animal, bird in egg, child in woman? Was it to be a girl or a boy that Immy would produce? No one could know in advance. Yet it meant everything to the soul crowded into the body. If this human snowflake had been taken from a waiting multitude of unborn angels, why had God sentenced this particular soul to life imprisonment in this particular child of dishonor? What mischief had it done in heaven to be sentenced to earth? Could it be true, as Dr. Chirnside preached, that this soul had been elected from the beginning of the world to unending damnation or unending rapture for the “glory” of God? What a fearful idea of glory! The worst Hun in history, the most merciless inquisitor, had never equaled that scheme of “glory.” Who was the human father of this child-to-be? And what share had he himself in it? The helpless grandfather of a helpless grandchild! Why would Immy not tell the father’s name? Perhaps she did not know! This thought was too loathsome to endure. Yet how could one unthink a thought that has drifted into his mind like a snowflake from nowhere? Why should the father of the child not even be aware of its birth, when the howling mother must be squeezed as if she were run through a clothes-wringer? Two thousand children were born dead every year in New York—such a strange long procession to the cemeteries! They were washed up on the shores of life, like the poor little victims of the Children’s Crusade who set out for Christ’s tomb and drowned in armies. If Immy’s baby could only be born dead what a solution of all problems! But it would splutter and kick, mewl and puke, and make itself a nuisance to every sense.