Other Cornelias fluttered about suggesting that the Gracchus was suffering from hunger, colic, or misdirected pins. The expert upon emergencies snatched this one from its embarrassed guardian, inverted it across her knee, and patted it manfully upon the back. The dirtiness of it, the thinness, the squalled wrappings, and the blue little hands and feet touched and quickened the Cornelias as no lecture could have done, and the resourceful vice-president found cause to congratulate herself on the _milieu_ of the meeting.
"If we knew," said a bespectacled Cornelia sensibly and practically, "what food they were giving it, we could easily send out and get a meal for it."
"It hardly looks," interrupted another, "like the Mellin's Food and Nestle's Milk Babies one sees in the advertisements."
"And yet," said the practical member, "we can't do anything until we know what it's accustomed to. With so young a child----"
Here the door opened and an unenrolled Cornelia was added to the gathering. Her red and yellow kimona rose and fell with her quick breathing. Defiance shone in her black eyes.
"You got mine baby," declared Rosie Rashnowsky. "Why couldn't you leave her be where I put her, you old Miss Fix-its? You scared me most to death until I heard her yellin'."
With these ungrateful remarks she advanced upon the ministering group and snatched the inverted infant from the colic theorist.
"This is the top of her," she pointed out. "I guess you didn't look very hard."
Before the discredited practitioner had formed a reply the Cornelia in spectacles was ready to remark:
"Sure is she," Rosie concurred; "ain't babies always hungry?"
"And if you will tell us what you feed her on," the lady continued, "we will send out for some of it before you take her home."
Rosie was by this time established in a chair with the now only whimpering baby upon her lap.
"Don't you bother," she genially remonstrated. "I just bought her something."
And then with many contortions she produced from some inner recess of her kimona a large dill pickle, imperfectly wrapped in moist newspaper. She dissevered a section of this with her own sharp teeth, and put it into the baby's waiting mouth. The cries of the youngest Rashnowsky were supplanted by a chorus of remonstrating Cornelias. "Pickles!" they cried, and shuddered. "Do you often give that baby pickles?"