Mrs. Porter was not used to such treatment. She found Ruth considerably
less malleable than she had been before marriage, and she resented the
change.
Kirk, coming in one afternoon, found Ruth laughing.
'It's only Aunt Lora,' she said. 'She will come in and lecture me on
how to raise babies. She's crazy about microbes. It's the new idea.
Sterilization, and all that. She thinks that everything a child touches
ought to be sterilized first to kill the germs. Bill's running awful
risks being allowed to play about the studio like this.'
Kirk looked at his son and heir, who was submitting at that moment to
be bathed. He was standing up. It was a peculiarity of his that he
refused to sit down in a bath, being apparently under the impression,
when asked to do so, that there was a conspiracy afoot to drown him.
'I don't see how the kid could be much fitter.'
'It's not so much what he is now. She is worrying about what might
happen to him. She can talk about bacilli till your flesh creeps.
Honestly, if Bill ever did get really ill, I believe Aunt Lora could
talk me round to her views about them in a minute. It's only the fact
that he is so splendidly well that makes it seem so absurd.'
Kirk laughed.
'It's all very well to laugh. You haven't heard her. I've caught myself
wavering a dozen times. Do you know, she says a child ought not to be
kissed?'
'It has struck me,' said Kirk meditatively, 'that your Aunt Lora, if I
may make the suggestion, is the least bit of what Steve would call a
shy-dome. Is there anything else she had mentioned?'
'Hundreds of things. Bill ought to be kept in a properly sterilized
nursery, with sterilized toys and sterilized everything, and the
temperature ought to be just so high and no higher, and just so low and
no lower. Get her to talk about it to you. She makes you wonder why
everybody is not dead.'
'This is a new development, surely? Has she ever broken out in this
place before?'
'Oh, yes. In the old days she often used to talk about it. She has
written books about it.'
'I thought her books were all about the selfishness of the modern young
man in not marrying.'
'Not at all. Some of them are about how to look after the baby. It's no
good the modern young man marrying if he's going to murder his baby
directly afterward, is it?'
'Something in that. There's just one objection to this sterilized
nursery business, though, which she doesn't seem to have detected. How
am I going to provide these things on an income of five thousand and at
the same time live in that luxury which the artist soul demands? Bill,
my lad, you'll have to sacrifice yourself for your father's good. When
I'm a millionaire we'll see about it. Meanwhile...'
'Meanwhile,' said Ruth, 'come and be dried before you catch your death
of cold.' She gathered William Bannister into her lap.
'I pity any germ that tries to play catch-as-catch-can with that
infant,' remarked Kirk. 'He'd simply flatten it out in a round. Did you
