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 he had! His nurse didn't let him have them all at once. She held him up and said, 'Baby, you must choose!' and he said, 'Teddy, please, Nanny,' and wagged his head at every word."

I had laid my hand on them at last. I wished, in the strangest way, that I had not. Yet of course it had to be.

"That's just what he did do," I said.

As she felt the fine kid-skin of the clockwork dog, her face began to twitch.

"I thought perhaps my baby had left me because I had so little to give him. But if a baby could leave all this!" She cried flatly, as though constant repetition in the night had made it as instinctive a reaction to suffering as a moan, "I want a child! I want a child!" Her arms invoked the wasted life that had been squandered in this room. "'It's all gone so wrong," she fretted, and her voice dropped to a solemn whisper. "They each had only half a life."