Part 25 (2/2)

”It's not so much what he is now. She is worrying about what might happen to him. She can talk about bacilli till your flesh creeps.

Honestly, if Bill ever did get really ill, I believe Aunt Lora could talk me round to her views about them in a minute. It's only the fact that he is so splendidly well that makes it seem so absurd.”

Kirk laughed.

”It's all very well to laugh. You haven't heard her. I've caught myself wavering a dozen times. Do you know, she says a child ought not to be kissed?”

”It has struck me,” said Kirk meditatively, ”that your Aunt Lora, if I may make the suggestion, is the least bit of what Steve would call a shy-dome. Is there anything else she had mentioned?'

”Hundreds of things. Bill ought to be kept in a properly sterilized nursery, with sterilized toys and sterilized everything, and the temperature ought to be just so high and no higher, and just so low and no lower. Get her to talk about it to you. She makes you wonder why everybody is not dead.”

”This is a new development, surely? Has she ever broken out in this place before?”

”Oh, yes. In the old days she often used to talk about it. She has written books about it.”

”I thought her books were all about the selfishness of the modern young man in not marrying.”

”Not at all. Some of them are about how to look after the baby. It's no good the modern young man marrying if he's going to murder his baby directly afterward, is it?”

”Something in that. There's just one objection to this sterilized nursery business, though, which she doesn't seem to have detected. How am I going to provide these things on an income of five thousand and at the same time live in that luxury which the artist soul demands? Bill, my lad, you'll have to sacrifice yourself for your father's good. When I'm a millionaire we'll see about it. Meanwhile--”

”Meanwhile,” said Ruth, ”come and be dried before you catch your death of cold.” She gathered William Bannister into her lap.

”I pity any germ that tries to play catch-as-catch-can with that infant,” remarked Kirk. ”He'd simply flatten it out in a round. Did you ever see such a chest on a kid of that age?”

It was after the installation of Whiskers at the studio that the diminution of Mrs. Porter's visits became really marked. There was something almost approaching a battle over Whiskers, who was an Irish terrier puppy which Hank Jardine had presented to William Bannister as a belated birthday present.

Mrs. Porter utterly excommunicated Whiskers. Nothing, she maintained, was so notoriously supercharged with bacilli as a long-haired dog. If this was true, William Bannister certainly gave them every chance to get to work upon himself. It was his constant pleasure to clutch Whiskers to him in a vice-like clinch, to bury his face in his s.h.a.ggy back, and generally to court destruction. Yet the more he clutched, the healthier did he appear to grow, and Mrs. Porter's demand for the dog's banishment was overruled.

Mrs. Porter retired in dudgeon. She liked to rule, and at No. 90 she felt that she had become merely among those present. She was in the position of a mother country whose colony has revolted. For years she had been accustomed to look on Ruth as a disciple, a weaker spirit whom she could mould to her will, and now Ruth was refusing to be moulded.

So Mrs. Porter's visits ceased. Ruth still saw her at the apartment when she cared to go there, but she kept away from the studio. She considered that in the matter of William Bannister her claim had been jumped, that she had been deposed; and she withdrew.

”I shall bear up,” said Kirk, when this fact was brought home to him.

”I mistrust your Aunt Lora as I should mistrust some great natural force which may become active at any moment and give you yours. An earthquake, for instance. I have no quarrel with your Aunt Lora in her quiescent state, but I fear the developments of that giant mind. We are better off without her.”

”All the same,” said Ruth loyally, ”she's rather a dear. And we ought to remember that, if it hadn't been for her, you and I would never have met.”

”I do remember it. And I'm grateful. But I can't help feeling that a woman capable of taking other people's lives and juggling with them as if they were india-rubber b.a.l.l.s as she did with ours, is likely at any moment to break out in a new place. My grat.i.tude to her is the sort of grat.i.tude you would feel toward a cyclone if you were walking home late for dinner and it caught you up and deposited you on your doorstep.

Your Aunt Lora is a human cyclone. No, on the whole, she's more like an earthquake. She has a habit of splitting up and altering the face of the world whenever she feels like it, and I'm too well satisfied with my world at present to relish the idea of having it changed.”

Little by little the garrison of the studio had been whittled down.

Except for Steve, the community had no regular members outside the family itself. Hank was generally out of town. Bailey paid one more visit, then seemed to consider that he could now absent himself altogether. And the members of Kirk's bachelor circle stayed away to a man.

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