Meredith that evening.
Rilla was singing upstairs as she put the baby to bed. Paris was saved--
the war was over--Germany had lost--there would soon be an end now--
Jem and Jerry would be back. The black clouds had rolled by.
"Don't you dare have colic this joyful night," she told the baby. "If
you do I'll clap you back into your soup tureen and ship you off to
Hopetown--by freight--on the early train. You have got beautiful eyes
--and you're not quite as red and wrinkled as you were--but you haven't
a speck of hair--and your hands are like little claws--and I don't
like you a bit better than I ever did. But I hope your poor little white
mother knows that you're tucked in a soft basket with a bottle of milk
as rich as Morgan allows instead of perishing by inches with old Meg
Conover. And I hope she doesn't know that I nearly drowned you that
first morning when Susan wasn't there and I let you slip right out of my
hands into the water. Why will you be so slippery? No, I don't like you
and I never will but for all that I'm going to make a decent, upstanding
infant of you. You are going to get as fat as a self-respecting child
should be, for one thing. I am not going to have people saying 'what a
puny little thing that baby of Rilla Blythe's is' as old Mrs. Drew said
at the senior Red Cross yesterday. If I can't love you I mean to be
proud of you at least.
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