AC dBooks

There must be something in a baby's face that has a miraculous effect on
every woman (as if these sweet angels, fresh from God, make us all young
and all beautiful), and it was even so at that moment.
Never shall I forget the transfiguration in the woman's face when she
looked into the face of my baby. The expression of brutality and
degradation disappeared, and through the bleared eyes and over the
coarsened features there came the light of an almost celestial smile.
After a while the woman spoke to me. She spoke in a husky voice which
seemed to be compounded of the effects of rum and raw night air.
"That your'n," she said.
I answered her.
"Boy or gel?"
I told her.
"'Ow old?"
I told her that too.
The woman was silent for a moment, and then, with a thickening of the
husky voice, she said:
"S'pose you'll say I'm a bleedin' liar, but I 'ad a kid as putty as that
onct--puttier. It was a boy. The nobbiest little b---- as you ever come
acrost. Your'n is putty, but it ain't in it with my Billie, not by a
long chalk.


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