"Miss Allen," said Susan, out of a silence, "he doesn't seem to be breathing. The blanket hasn't gotten over his little face, has it?"
So began the joyous martyrdom. Susan's heart would never beat again only for herself. Hand in hand with the rapture of owning the baby walked the terror of losing him. His meals might have been a special miracle, so awed and radiant was Susan's face when she had him in her arms. His goodness, when he was good, seemed to her no more remarkable than his badness, when he was bad. Susan ran to him after the briefest absences with icy fear at her heart. He had loosened a pin--gotten it into his mouth, he had wedged his darling little head in between the bars of his crib---!
But she left him very rarely. What Susan did now must be done at home. Her six-days-old son asleep beside her, she was discovered by Anna cheerfully dictating to her nurse "Mary Jane's Letter" for an approaching issue of the "Protest." The young mother laughed joyfully at Anna's concern, but later, when the trained nurse was gone, and the warm heavy days of the hot summer came, when fat little Martin was restless through the long, summer nights with teething, Susan's courage and strength were put to a hard test.
"We ought to get a girl in to help you," Billy said, distressedly, on a night when Susan, flushed and excited, refused his help everywhere, and attempted to manage baby and dinner and house unassisted.
"We ought to get clothes and china and linen and furniture,--we ought to move out of this house and this block!" Susan wanted to say. But with some effort she refrained from answering at all, and felt tears sting her eyes when Billy carried the baby off, to do with his big gentle fingers all the folding and pinning and buttoning that preceded Martin's disappearance for the evening.
"Never mind!" Susan said later, smiling bravely over the dinner table, "he needs less care every day! He'll soon be walking and amusing himself."
But Martin was only staggering uncertainly and far from self- sufficient when Billy Junior came laughing into the family group. "How do women DO it!" thought Susan, recovering slowly from a second heavy drain on nerves and strength.
No other child, of course, would ever mean to her quite what the oldest son meant. The first-born is the miracle, brought from Heaven itself through the very gates of death, a pioneer, merciless and helpless, a little monarch whose kingdom never existed before the day he set up his feeble little cry. All the delightful innovations are for him,--the chair, the mug, the little airings, the remodeled domestic routine.