Sadie Kate has been acting like a little deil--do they have feminine
deils? If not, Sadie Kate has originated the species. And this afternoon
Loretta Higgins had--well, I don't know whether it was a sort of fit or
just a temper. She lay down on the floor and howled for a solid hour,
and when any one tried to approach her, she thrashed about like a little
windmill and bit and kicked.
By the time the doctor came she had pretty well worn herself out.
He picked her up, limp and drooping, and carried her to a cot in the
hospital room; and after she was asleep he came down to my library and
asked to look at the archives.
Loretta is thirteen; in the three years she has been here she has had
five of these outbreaks, and has been punished good and hard for them.
The child's ancestral record is simple: "Mother died of alcoholic
dementia, Bloomingdale Asylum. Father unknown."
He studied the page long and frowningly and shook his head.
"With a heredity like that, is it right to punish the child for having a
shattered nervous system?"
"It is not," said I, firmly. "We will mend her shattered nervous
system."
"If we can."
"We'll feed her up on cod-liver oil and sunshine, and find a nice kind
foster mother who will take pity on the poor little--"
But then my voice trailed off into nothing as I pictured Loretta's face,
with her hollow eyes and big nose and open mouth and no chin and stringy
hair and sticking-out ears. No foster mother in the world would love a
child who looked like that.
"Why, oh, why," I wailed, "doesn't the good Lord send orphan children
with blue eyes and curly hair and loving dispositions? I could place a
million of that sort in kind homes, but no one wants Loretta."
"I'm afraid the good Lord doesn't have anything to do with bringing our
Lorettas into the world. It is the devil who attends to them."
Poor Sandy! He gets awfully pessimistic about the future of the
universe; but I don't wonder, with such a cheerless life as he leads. He
looked today as though his own nervous system was shattered. He had been
splashing about in the rain since five this morning, when he was called
to a sick baby case. I made him sit down and have some tea, and we had a
nice, cheerful talk on drunkenness and idiocy and epilepsy and insanity.
He dislikes alcoholic parents, but he ties himself into a knot over
insane parents.
Privately, I don't believe there's one thing in heredity, provided you
snatch the babies away before their eyes are opened.