Seeing the supplication in my eyes she lifted up the thick dirty-gray shawl with the air of a benefactress. "Three months." The first thing they tell of a child is its age. The little worm very leisurely wrinkled its forehead of peeling satin and stretched itself, opened two rather glassy eyes encircled by mauve, and let out its guttural wail through a toothless aperture upholstered with flesh. The provident mother had already pulled a rubber pacifier out of her pocket, which transformed the wail into a monotonous greedy gurgle.

"Will you be quiet! They're an awful trouble. You'll see," she declared, gauging my heavy figure. "I had bad luck, I had no milk. No use giving him gravy or bread soaked and boiled. He doesn't get any good out of them. If you think you can fatten them on the doctor's fine words, as if the doctors even know what they're talking about!"

"I believe you!" bawled a big blonde. The baby which she had a triumphant way of carrying had hanging cheeks and bottle-blue eyes in buttonhole slits. "Just look at mine. At nine months it ate like us. What do you say to that, eh?"

A group gathered.

"What are you here for then?" asked a huge creature with a gray ogress head, high cheekbones and skin streaked with fine veins. The blonde turned her baby over and showed its chubby flesh covered with a crusty, scabby, red-streaked sheath.

"Oh, only this." The ogress dropped into an empty place on the bench and paraded her darling on her knees.

Title: Woman By Magdeleine Marx. Translated by Adele Szold Seltzer. Published 1920.

Brushes by Gvalkyrie