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"It's a mighty important year for you, my love," said Eleanore. She thoughtfully held up and surveyed a tiny infant's nightgown. "If you do this you'll be giving up. It's not writing your best. It's giving up what you think is the truth. And that's a bad habit to get into." "It's settled now. Please leave it alone." "Oh very well," she said placidly. "Let's talk of what I've been doing."
The Doctor's only child, poor Bessie's offspring, had died the better part of a hundred years before, and his grandchildren, a numerous and dimly remembered brood, had vanished along his weary track in their youth, maturity, or incipient age, till, hardly knowing, how it had all happened, he found himself tottering onward with an infant's small fingers in his nerveless grasp.
He was but a personification of the rules of the Church; of the priest he retained only the gestures; he was like an empty sepulchre in which not even the ashes of hope remained; yet grief-stricken weeping women worshipped him and kissed his cassock; and it was a tortured mother whose infant was in danger of death, who had implored him to come and ask that infant's cure of Jesus, certain as she felt that Jesus would grant her the boon in that sanctuary of Montmartre where blazed the prodigy of His heart, all burning with love.
No one ever saw her; but a gentle tinkling through the palace betrayed her presence, and when that ceased, the grey lock on the infant's temple was always found to have twisted itself into a curl. At the end of five hundred years, Wendelin XV. was carried to his grave. No Greylock had ever possessed a more luxuriant grey curl than his, and yet he had died young.
If earthly life has any virtue, then the infant's soul is robbed of its right. If earthly life has no virtue, the adult souls are forced to live a useless existence on earth, running the risk of damnation if they fail, while the infant souls escape this. Is this equality of opportunity and experience, or Justice? There would seem to be something wrong with either the facts, or the theory.
Nevertheless, as he lived in a spacious house in Golden Square, which, in addition to a brass plate upon the street-door, had another brass plate two sizes and a half smaller upon the left hand door-post, surrounding a brass model of an infant's fist grasping a fragment of a skewer, and displaying the word 'Office, it was clear that Mr Ralph Nickleby did, or pretended to do, business of some kind; and the fact, if it required any further circumstantial evidence, was abundantly demonstrated by the diurnal attendance, between the hours of half-past nine and five, of a sallow-faced man in rusty brown, who sat upon an uncommonly hard stool in a species of butler's pantry at the end of the passage, and always had a pen behind his ear when he answered the bell.
They wanted all the luxuries of the season, confound 'em!" "You were alone when you were dealing with these men?" said Cleever, watching The Infant's face under the palm of his hand. He was receiving new ideas, and they seemed to trouble him. "Of course, unless you count the mosquitoes. They were nearly as big as the men.
No other milk, however skillfully modulated, no "infant's food," however scientifically prepared, can fully take its place. Unless illness prevents her from feeding her own child, or she is of a moody and unhappy disposition, it is the mother's place to give her breast to the infant. The condition of mind of the mother has a great deal to do with the quality of the milk.
Yes, my lord, I recollect perfectly well, it was a very ugly cut, especially in an infant's head; but I am glad to find you feel no bad effects from it. Have you any cicatrice on the place? Eleven feet high, did you say? and is the giant's skeleton in your neighbourhood?"
Still more erroneous is the practice of some careless nurses, of carrying the child quite upright a part of the time, almost without any support at all. There can be no doubt that the spinal column of many a child is injured for life in this way. There can be no apology for such things. But it is not sufficient to denounce, merely, the custom of holding the infant's body in an erect position.
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