Meantime, the latest workhouse character slumbered in the nursery in passive enjoyment of the excellent rate-supported fires, and was fed with a scientific fluid, so Pasteurized and sterilized and generally Bowdlerized that it seemed quite vulgar to call it milk. The nurses adorned the cot with all the finery they could collect, and all the women in the place managed to evade the rules of classification, and got into the nursery, where they dandled the infant and said it was "a shame." One of the most devoted worshippers at the shrine of Daphne Daventry was a lady Guardian, a frail and tiny little woman, with a pair of wide-open eyes, from which a look of horror was never wholly absent. She was always very shabbily dressed--so shabbily, indeed, that a new official had once taken her for a "case" and conducted her to the waiting-room of applicants for relief. After such an object-lesson, any other woman would have gone to do some shopping; but not so the little lady Guardian--she did not even brighten her dowdiness with a new pair of bonnet-strings. Though she wrote herself down in the nomination-papers as a "married woman," no one had ever seen or heard of her husband, and report said that he was either a lunatic or a convict. This mystery of her married life, combined with her "dreadful appearance" and a certain reckless generosity towards the poor, made her many enemies amongst scientific philanthropists. Her large-hearted charity had been given to the just and the unjust, to the drunk as well as the sober, and the Charity Organization Society complained that her investigations were not thorough, and that the quality of her mercy was neither strained nor trained. But the little lady Guardian opened her old silk purse again and quoted the Scriptures: "Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow turn not thou away." The C.O.S. replied, such precepts had proved to be out of date economically, and nominated a more modern lady, who had missed a great career as a private detective. But the little lady Guardian had a faithful majority, and her name was always head of the poll. One afternoon, as the little lady Guardian sat by the fire with Daphne Daventry on her shabby serge lap, a prospective parent, Mrs. Annie Smith, was brought up to see if she "took to the child." "Oh, what a lovely baby!" she cried, falling on her knees to adore. "What nice blue eyes, and what dear little hands! And her hair is beginning to grow already! Both my children died five years ago; I have never had another, and I just feel as if I could not live without a baby. It is terrible to lose one's children." "It is worse to have none." "Oh, no, no!" "Yes, it is," said the little lady Guardian in a low voice, as if she were talking to herself. "When I was a little girl I had six sailor-boy dolls, and I always meant to have six sons; but directly after my marriage I realized it could never be."