She stopped at a door on the first floor.
'This is Bill's nursery. He's out just now. Mamie takes him for a drive
every morning when it's fine.'
Something impelled Kirk to speak.
'Don't you ever take him for walks in the morning now?' he asked. 'He
used to love it.'
'Silly! Of course I do, when I can manage it. For drives, rather. Aunt
Lora is rather against his walking much in the city. He might so easily
catch something, you know.'
She opened the door.
'There!' she said. 'What do you think of that for a nursery?'
If Kirk had spoken his mind he would have said that of all the ghastly
nurseries the human brain could have conceived this was the ghastliest.
It was a large, square room, and to Kirk's startled eyes had much the
appearance of an operating theatre at a hospital.
There was no carpet on the tiled floor. The walls, likewise tiled, were
so bare that the eye ached contemplating them. In the corner by the
window stood the little white cot. Beside it on the wall hung a large
thermometer. Various knobs of brass decorated the opposite wall. At the
farther end of the room was a bath, complete with shower and all the
other apparatus of a modern tub.
It was probably the most horrible room in all New York.
'Well, what do you think of it?' demanded Ruth proudly.
Kirk gazed at her, speechless. This, he said to himself, was Ruth, his
wife, who had housed his son in the spare bedroom of the studio and
allowed a shaggy Irish terrier to sleep on his bed; who had permitted
him to play by the hour in the dust of the studio floor, who had even
assisted him to do so by descending into the dust herself in the role
of a bear or a snake.
What had happened to this world from which he had been absent but one
short year? Was everybody mad, or was he hopelessly behind the times?
'Well?' Ruth reminded him.
Kirk eyed the dreadful room.
'It looks clean,' he said at last.
'It is clean,' said the voice of Lora Delane Porter proudly behind him.
She had followed them up the stairs to do the honours of the nursery,
the centre of her world. 'It is essentially clean. There is not an
object in that room which is not carefully sterilized night and morning
with a weak solution of boric acid!'
'Even Mamie?' inquired Kirk.
It had been his intention to be mildly jocular, but Mrs. Porter's reply
showed him that in jest he had spoken the truth.
'Certainly. Have you any idea, Kirk, of the number of germs there are
on the surface of the human body? It runs into billions. You', she
fixed him with her steely eye, 'you are at the present moment one mass
of microbes.'
'I sneaked through quarantine all right.'
'To the adult there is not so much danger in these microbes, provided
he or she maintains a reasonable degree of personal cleanliness. That
