“Only she’s honestly and absolutely all of that!” Susan defended her eagerly, “there’s no pose!  She really is unspoiled and good—­my dear, if the other women in her set were one-tenth as good as Isabel!  However, to go back.  She came over here to spend the day with me, just before Jo was born, and we had a wonderful day.  Billy and I were taking our dinners at a boarding-house, for a few months, and Big Mary had nothing else to do but look out for the boys in the afternoon.  Isabel watched me giving them their baths, and feeding them their lunches, and finally she said, ’I’d like to do that for Alan, but I never do!’ ‘Why don’t you?’ I said.  Well, she explained that in the first place there was a splendid experienced woman paid twenty-five dollars a week to do it, and that she herself didn’t know how to do it half as well.  She said that when she went into the nursery there was a general smoothing out of her way before her, one maid handing her the talcum, another running with towels, and Miss Louise, as they call her, pleasantly directing her and amusing Alan.  Naturally, she can’t drive them all out; she couldn’t manage without them!  In fact, we came to the conclusion that you have to be all or nothing to a baby.  If Isabel made up her mind to put Alan to bed every night say, she’d have to cut out a separate affair every day for it, rush home from cards, or from the links, or from the matinee, or from tea—­Jack wouldn’t like it, and she says she doubts if it would make much impression on Alan, after all!”

“I’d do it, just the same!” said Anna, “and I wouldn’t have the nurse standing around, either—­and yet, I suppose that’s not very reasonable,” she went on, after a moment’s thought, “for that’s Conrad’s free time.  We drive nearly every day, and half the time dine somewhere out of town.  And his having to operate at night so much makes him want to sleep in the morning, so that we couldn’t very well have a baby in the room.  I suppose I’d do as the rest do, pay a fine nurse, and grab minutes with the baby whenever I could!”

“You have to be poor to get all the fun out of children,” Susan said.  “They’re at their very sweetest when they get their clothes off, and run about before their nap, or when they wake up and call you, or when you tell them stories at night.”

“But, Sue, a woman like Mrs. Furlong does not have to work so hard,” Anna said decidedly, “you must admit that!  Her life is full of ease and beauty and power—­doesn’t that count?  Doesn’t that give her a chance for self-development, and a chance to make herself a real companion to her husband?” “Well, the problems of the world aren’t answered in books, Nance.  It just doesn’t seem interesting, or worth while to me!  She could read books, of course, and attend lectures, and study languages.  But—­did you see the ‘Protest’ last week?”

“No, I didn’t!  It comes, and I put it aside to read—­”