Page:The food of the gods, and how it came to earth.djvu/77



"Yes. Put on forty-one ounces in ten days. Weighs nearly four stone. And only six months old! Naturally rather alarming."

"Healthy?"

"Vigorous. His nurse is leaving because he kicks so forcibly. And everything, of course, shockingly outgrown. Everything, you know, has had to be made fresh, clothes and everything. Perambulator--light affair--broke one wheel, and the youngster had to be brought home on the milkman's hand-truck. Yes. Quite a crowd.... And we've put Georgina Phyllis back into his cot and put him into the bed of Georgina Phyllis. His mother--naturally alarmed. Proud at first and inclined to praise Winkles. Not now. Feels the thing _can't_ be wholesome. _You_ know."

"I imagined you were going to put him on diminishing doses."

"I tried it."

"Didn't it work?"

"Howls. In the ordinary way the cry of a child is loud and distressing; it is for the good of the species that this should be so--but since he has been on the Herakleophorbia treatment---"

"Mm," said Bensington, regarding his fingers with more resignation than he had hitherto displayed.

"Practically the thing _must_ come out. People will hear of this child, connect it up with our hens and things, and the whole thing will come round to my wife.... How she will take it I haven't the remotest idea."