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have it at all.
‘If I’d only known then all I do now,’ she said.
She laughed at Philip, because he was anxious about its
welfare.
‘You couldn’t make more fuss if you was the father,’ she
said. ‘I’d like to see Emil getting into such a stew about it.’
Philip’s mind was full of the stories he had heard of baby-
farming and the ghouls who ill-treat the wretched children
that selfish, cruel parents have put in their charge.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ said Mildred. ‘That’s when you give a
woman a sum down to look after a baby. But when you’re
going to pay so much a week it’s to their interest to look af-
ter it well.’
Philip insisted that Mildred should place the child with
people who had no children of their own and would prom-
ise to take no other.
‘Don’t haggle about the price,’ he said. ‘I’d rather pay half
a guinea a week than run any risk of the kid being starved
or beaten.’
‘You’re a funny old thing, Philip,’ she laughed.
To him there was something very touching in the child’s
helplessness. It was small, ugly, and querulous. Its birth had
been looked forward to with shame and anguish. Nobody
wanted it. It was dependent on him, a stranger, for food,
shelter, and clothes to cover its nakedness.
As the train started he kissed Mildred. He would have
kissed the baby too, but he was afraid she would laugh at
him.
‘You will write to me, darling, won’t you? And I shall look

Of Human Bondage