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 crib, and it would be an ivory-colored crib with perhaps a picture of a pussy-cat at the head and foot.

"Eddie." One had to tell Eddie, and it seemed proper that one should be careless and hard in the telling. "I think I'm pregnant."

Eddie looked at her without speaking. He was leaning against the built-in sideboard in the kitchen while Dot fried the chops for supper.

"It's the twenty-eighth now," she went on. "Yep, I guess I'm pregnant."

"You don't seem much worried," he said.

"Of course, I'm not worried," she began gayly and stopped short. There was something in his face that stopped her. She ought to be worried. He was worried. The familiar eyes had narrowed in their equally familiar way.

Worried! God, a baby! They were all right, of course. Some fellows were simply coo-coo about their kids, and the little devils got so after a while that they would say Daddy. But Dot standing there at the stove, young, smiling—pretty green, Dot. What did she know about pain? And it was pain. Eddie could imagine pain. He could see it coming unexpectedly upon Dot, catching her in the dead of night, catching her while she smiled in her sleep. Even his arm about her wouldn't help, and how could she know what it would be like? Young, smiling, frying chops, and telling him that she was pregnant, in the tone she used to the iceman when she ordered a twenty-cent piece of ice. But maybe—Even Dot was a woman. Maybe she wanted a baby. Cute damn things. Once a baby in a bakery had got so that she knew Eddie and had quite unexpectedly made him a present of her rattle. It had been a pink rabbit with little pebbles inside. Of course, he'd given it back to her; but it was the idea of the thing.

"Do you want a baby?" he asked.