“Nurses at Bethlehem!” said Jenkins, furious, when he came to pay his weekly visit.  “Are you out of your mind?  Well! why then have we goats at all, and meadows to pasture them; what becomes of my idea, and the pamphlets upon my idea?  What happens to all that?  But you are going against my system.  You are stealing the founder’s money.”

“All the same, mon cher maitre,” the student tried to reply, passing his hands through his long red beard, “all the same, they will not take this nourishment.”

“Well, then, let them go without, but let the principle of artificial lactation be respected.  That is the whole point.  I do not wish to have to repeat it to you again.  Send off these wretched nurses.  For the rearing of our children we have goats’ milk, cows’ milk in case of absolute necessity.  I can make no further concession in the matter.”

He added, with an assumption of his apostle’s air:  “We are here for the demonstration of a philanthropic idea.  It must be made to triumph, even at the price of some sacrifices.”

Pondevez insisted no further.  After all the place was a good one, near enough to Paris to allow of descents upon Nanterre of a Sunday from the Quarter, or to allow the director to pay a visit to his old brasseries.  Mme. Polge, to whom Jenkins always referred as “our intelligent superintendent,” and whom he had placed there to superintend everything, and chiefly the director himself, was not so austere, as her prerogatives might have led one to suppose, and submitted willingly to a few liqueur-glasses of cognac or to a game of bezique.  He dismissed the nurses, therefore, and endeavoured to harden himself in advance to everything that could happen.  What did happen?  A veritable Massacre of the Innocents.  Consequently the few parents in fairly easy circumstances, workpeople or suburban tradesfolk, who, tempted by the advertisements, had severed themselves from their children, very soon took them home again, and there only remained in the establishment some little unfortunates picked up on doorsteps or in out-of-the-way places, sent from the foundling hospitals, doomed to all evil things from their birth.  As the mortality continued to increase, even these came to be scarce, and the omnibus which had posted to the railway station would return bouncing and light as an empty hearse.  How long would the thing last?  How long would the twenty-five or thirty little ones who remained take to die?  This was what Monsieur the Director, or rather, to give him the nickname which he had himself invented, Monsieur the Grantor-of-Certificates-of-death Pondevez, was asking himself one morning as he sat opposite Mme. Polge’s venerable ringlets, taking a hand in this lady’s favourite game.