“No. But it was different with you: they didn’t ask you to give up things.”

“What things?” What in the world (Delia wondered) had poor Charlotte that any one could want her to give up? She had always been in the position of taking rather than of having to surrender. “Can’t you explain to me, dear?” Delia urged.

“My poor children—he says I’m to give them up,” cried the girl in a stricken whisper.{30}

{30}

“Give them up? Give up helping them?”

“Seeing them—looking after them. Give them up altogether. He got his mother to explain to me. After—after we have children ... he’s afraid ... afraid our children might catch things.... He’ll give me money, of course, to pay some one ... a hired person, to look after them. He thought that handsome,” Charlotte broke out with a sob. She flung off her bonnet and smothered her prostrate weeping in the cushions.

Delia sat perplexed. Of all unforeseen complications this was surely the least imaginable. And with all the acquired Ralston that was in her she could not help seeing the force of Joe’s objection, could almost find herself agreeing with him. No one in New York had forgotten the death of the poor Henry van der Luydens’ only{31} child, who had caught small-pox at the circus to which an unprincipled nurse had surreptitiously taken him. After such a warning as that, parents felt justified in every precaution against contagion. And poor people were so ignorant and careless, and their children, of course, so perpetually exposed to everything catching. No, Joe Ralston was certainly right, and Charlotte almost insanely unreasonable. But it would be useless to tell her so now. Instinctively, Delia temporized.

{31}

“After all,” she whispered to the prone ear, “if it’s only after you have children—you may not have any—for some time.”

“Oh, yes, I shall!” came back in anguish from the cushions.

Delia smiled with matronly superiority. “Really, Chatty, I don’t quite see how you can know. You don’t understand.”

Charlotte Lovell lifted herself up. Her{32} collar of Brussels lace had come undone and hung in a wisp on her crumpled bodice, and through the disorder of her hair the white lock glimmered haggardly. In her pale brown eyes the little green specks floated like leaves in a trout-pool.

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