One old gentleman raised a town laugh by boasting that he had taken a whole tumblerful of Manhattan water every morning for years and was still alive. And yet the dream of bringing a foreign river in would not down, though the believers in the artesian wells were ridiculed for “the idea of supplying a populous city with water from its own bowels.” The cholera had brought a number round to the Westchester project, but the cholera passed in God’s good time. It would come back when God willed. Plagues were part of the human weather like floods and drouths, and not to be forefended. In any case Patty was busied with her own concerns. Her baby was born on Tuliptree Farm before her husband could get back from White Plains with the doctor, though he had lashed his horses till the carry-all flung to and fro like a broken rudder. The son and heir was a girl, and in the hope that she would be an heiress they named her after Patty’s Aunt Imogene, whose husband had recently died and left her a fleet of vessels in the Chinese trade. For a time instinct and pride in the flattery of people who cried that the child was its mother’s own beautiful image gave the tiny replica a fascination to Patty. She played with it as if it were a doll, and she a little girl only pretending to motherhood. But she tired of the bauble and turned the baby over to the servants. Her Aunt Imogene cried out against her: “Nowadays women don’t take care of their babies like they used to when I was a girl. In the good old-fashioned days a mother was a mother. She was proud to nurse her children and she knew all about their ills and ailments. I had eleven children and raised all of them but six, and I would no more have dreamed of hiring a nurse for them than I would have I don’t know what. But these modern mothers!” Criticism had no power over Patty, however. She admitted all that was charged against her and simply added it to the long list of grievances she had against her fate. RoBards often felt that this was cheating of the lowest kind. It left a man no means of either comforting distress or rebuking misbehavior. As soon as the baby could be weaned from her mother to a nurse, Patty made a pretext of ill health and joined the hegira to Saratoga Springs, which was winning the fashion hunters away from Ballston Spa. She traveled with some friends from the South who brought North a convoy of slaves and camped along the road, preferring that gypsy gait to the luxury of a voyage up the river on the palatial steamboats, in which America led the world. During that summer RoBards was both mother and father to the child, and Immy’s fingers grew into and around his heart like the ivy that embraced the walls of the house. He was bitter against his wife, whose fingers had let his heart slip with ease and indifference.