“I have as little experience as you,” said Irais, “because I have no children; but if you don’t yearn after startling originality, nothing is easier than to write bits about them. I believe I could do a dozen in an hour.”
She sat down at the writing-table, took up an old letter, and scribbled for about five minutes. “There,” she said, throwing it to Minora, “you may have it—pink toes and all complete.”
Minora put on her eyeglasses and read aloud:
“When my baby shuts her eyes and sings her hymns at bedtime my stale and battered soul is filled with awe. All sorts of vague memories crowd into my mind—memories of my own mother and myself—how many years ago!—of the sweet helplessness of being gathered up half asleep in her arms, and undressed, and put in my cot, without being wakened; of the angels I believed in; of little children coming straight from heaven, and still being surrounded, so long as they were good, by the shadow of white wings—all the dear poetic nonsense learned, just as my baby is learning it, at her mother’s knee. She has not an idea of the beauty of the charming things she is told, and stares wide-eyed, with heavenly eyes, while her mother talks of the heaven she has so lately come from, and is relieved and comforted by the interrupting bread and milk. At two years old she does not understand angels, and does understand bread and milk; at five she has vague notions about them, and prefers bread and milk; at ten both bread and milk and angels have been left behind in the nursery, and she has already found out that they are luxuries not necessary to her everyday life. In later years she may be disinclined to accept truths secondhand, insist on thinking for herself, be earnest in her desire to shake off exploded traditions, be untiring in her efforts to live according to a high moral standard and to be strong, and pure, and good—”
“Like tea,” explained Irais.
“—yet will she never, with all her virtues, possess one-thousandth part of the charm that clung about her when she sang, with quiet eyelids, her first reluctant hymns, kneeling on her mother’s knees. I love to come in at bedtime and sit in the window in the setting sunshine watching the mysteries of her going to bed. Her mother tubs her, for she is far too precious to be touched by any nurse, and then she is rolled up in a big bath towel, and only her little pink toes peep out; and when she is powdered, and combed, and tied up in her nightdress, and all her curls are on end, and her ears glowing, she is knelt down on her mother’s lap, a little bundle of fragrant flesh, and her face reflects the quiet of her mother’s face as she goes through her evening prayer for pity and for peace.”
“How very curious!” said Minora, when she had finished. “That is exactly what I was going to say.”
“Oh, then I have saved you the trouble of putting it together; you can copy that if you like.”
“But have you a stale soul, Miss Minora?” I asked.
“Well, do you know, I rather think that is a good touch,” she replied; “it will make people really think a man wrote the book. You know I am going to take a man’s name.”
“That is precisely what I imagined,” said Irais. “You will call yourself John Jones, or George Potts, or some such sternly commonplace name, to emphasise your uncompromising attitude towards all feminine weaknesses, and no one will be taken in.”
“I really think, Elizabeth,” said Irais to me later, when the click of Minora’s typewriter was heard hesitating in the next room, “that you and I are writing her book for her. She takes down everything we say. Why does she copy all that about the baby? I wonder why mothers’ knees are supposed to be touching? I never learned anything at them, did you? But then in my case they were only stepmother’s, and nobody ever sings their praises.”
“My mother was always at parties,” I said; “and the nurse made me say my prayers in French.”
“And as for tubs and powder,” went on Irais, “when I was a baby such things were not the fashion. There were never any bathrooms, and no tubs; our faces and hands were washed, and there was a foot-bath in the room, and in the summer we had a bath and were put to bed afterwards for fear we might catch cold. My stepmother didn’t worry much; she used to wear pink dresses all over lace, and the older she got the prettier the dresses got. When is she going?”
“Who? Minora? I haven’t asked her that.”
“Then I will. It is really bad for her art to be neglected like this. She has been here an unconscionable time—it must be nearly three weeks.”
“Yes, she came the same day you did,” I said pleasantly.
Irais was silent. I hope she was reflecting that it is not worse to neglect one’s art than one’s husband, and her husband is lying all this time stretched on a bed of sickness, while she is spending her days so agreeably with me. She has a way of forgetting that she has a home, or any other business in the world than just to stay on chatting with me, and reading, and singing, and laughing at anyone there is to laugh at, and kissing the babies, and tilting with the Man of Wrath. Naturally I love her—she is so pretty that anybody with eyes in his head must love her—but too much of anything is bad, and next month the passages and offices are to be whitewashed, and people who have ever whitewashed their houses inside know what nice places they are to live in while it is being done; and there will be no dinner for Irais, and none of those
