Jimmie in his banana cradle slept better than any of the other babies had. He had a little more air. Also he was cleaner than the others, because his mother had learned that dirt and disease germs are dangerous. But it is not easy, you should know, to keep children clean where every pint of water you wash them in must be carried up stairs from the tap on the first floor and down stairs again to the drain. A frequent bath all around in the one stewpan that perforce must serve for the purpose is out of the question. But there was a real wash basin now among the new household furnishings that Mrs. Smith was gradually acquiring. There are so many things that one goes without when one’s husband is an ordinary labourer at the limit line of 18s. a week. But when he becomes a soldier and you get your regular separation allowance from the government, you begin to rise in the social scale. Mrs. Smith, like so many others of the English working class women, now during the war was “getting on her feet.” And some of the improvement in family life was certainly registering in that chart card at the school consultation that recorded Jimmie’s progress. When his father, home from Flanders on furlough, held him on his knee, it was a better baby than he had ever held there before. For one thing it was a heavier baby: children in this district used to average thirteen pounds at one year of age. And now those whose attendance at the consultations is regular average sixteen and seventy-five hundredths pounds. Also Jimmie was a healthier baby. He hadn’t rickets, like the first baby, who had suffered from malnutrition. What could you do when there was a pint of milk a day for the family and the baby had “what was left”? He hadn’t tuberculous joints, like the second baby. He hadn’t died of summer complaint, like the third and the fifth babies. And he hadn’t had convulsions, like the seventh baby, who had been born blind and who fortunately had died too. Yes, when one counts them up, there have been a good many, and if some hadn’t died, where would Mrs. Smith have put them all? The six that there are, seem quite to fill two rooms and the one bed.