He was not quiet long.  He stretched himself, he writhed, he made himself limp, he made himself stiff, he threw himself backwards recklessly; and still Miss Batchelor held him.  And when he cried she held him all the closer.  She let him explore the front of her dress with his little wet mouth and fingers.  He had made a great many futile experiments of the kind in the last two days.  Of those three worlds that were his, the world of light, the world of sleep, and the world of his mother’s breast, they had taken away the one that he liked best—­the warm living world of which he had been lord and master, that was flesh of his flesh, given to his hands to hold, and obedient to the pressure of his lips.  Since then he had lived from feeble hope to hope; and now, when he struck upon that hard and narrow tract of corduroy studded with comfortless buttons, he began again his melancholy wail.

“Poor little beggar,” said Mrs. Nevill Tyson, “he can’t help it.  He’s being weaned.  Don’t let him slobber over your nice dress.”

Certainly he had not improved the corduroy, but Miss Batchelor did not seem to resent it.

“Can’t you nurse him?” she asked.

“No,” said Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

“I don’t believe it,” said Miss Batchelor to herself.  “She isn’t that sort.  It’s the clever, nervous, modern women who can’t nurse their children—­it all runs to brains.  But these little animals!  If ever there was a woman born to suckle fools, it’s Mrs. Nevill Tyson.  She’s got the physique, the temperament, everything.  And she can give her whole mind to it.”

“What a pity,” she said aloud, and Mrs. Nevill Tyson laughed.

“I don’t want to nurse him; why should I?” said she.  She lay back in her attitude of indifference, watching her son, and watched by Miss Batchelor’s sharp eyes and heartless brain.

Heartless?  Well, I can’t say.  Not altogether, perhaps.  Goodness knows what went on in the heart of that extraordinary woman, condemned by her own cleverness to perpetual maidenhood.

“How very odd,” said she to Mrs. Nevill Tyson.

To herself she said, “I thought so.  It’s not that she can’t.  She won’t—­selfish little thing.  And yet—­she isn’t the kind that abominates babies, as such.  Therefore if she doesn’t care for this small thing, that is because it’s her husband’s child.”

To do Miss Batchelor justice, she was appalled by her own logic.  Was it the logic of the heart or of the brain?  She did not stop to think.  Having convinced herself that her argument was a chain of adamant, she caught herself leaning on it for support, with the surprising result that she found it easier to be kind to Mrs. Nevill Tyson (a woman who presumably did not love her husband) when she took her leave.

I am not going to be hard on her.  To some women a bitterer thing than not to be loved is not to be allowed to love.  And when two women insist on loving the same man, the despised one is naturally skeptical as to the strength and purity and eternity of the other’s feelings.  “She never loved him!” is the heart’s consolation to the lucid brain reiterating “He never loved me!” I did not say that Miss Batchelor loved Tyson.