The absurdity of it makes me laugh now, but with the shrieks of baby piercing me, I felt as if I were involved in a tragedy of the deepest dye. I think I was never so near hysterics in my life; but I had even then some faint and far-away sense of how ridiculous I was, and that saved me. Thomasine yelled like a young tornado, and every cry went through me like a knife. I was on my knees on the floor, pouring out tears like a watering-pot, trying to shut out the sound. There is something in a baby's cry that is too much even for a sense of humor; and no woman could have heard it without being overcome.
I had so stopped my ears that although I could not shut out baby's cries entirely I did not hear Hannah and Rosa when they came skulking back. The first I knew of their being behind me was when Hannah, in a whispered bellow, shouted into my ear that baby would cry herself into convulsions. Demoralized as I was already, I almost yielded; I started to my feet, and faced them in a tragic manner, ready to give up everything. I was ready to say that Rosa might walk up and down with Tomine every night for the rest of her life. Fortunately some few gleams of common sense asserted themselves in my half-addled pate, and instead of opening the door, I spread out my arms, and without a word shooed the girls out of the corridor as if they were hens. Then the ludicrousness of it came over me, and although I still tingled with baby's wailing, I could appreciate that the cries were more angry than pathetic, and that we must fight the battle through now it had been begun. The drollest thing about it all was that it seemed almost as if the willful little lady inside there had some uncanny perception of my thought. I had no sooner got the girls downstairs again, and made up my mind to hold out than she stopped crying; and when we crept cautiously in ten minutes after, she was asleep as soundly and as sweetly as ever.
But I feel as if I had been through battles, murders, and sudden deaths.
May 20. Baby to-night cried two or three minutes, but her ladyship evidently had the sense to see that crying is a painful and useless exercise when she has to deal with such a hard-hearted tyrant as I am, and she quickly gave it up. Rosa hoped pointedly that the poor little thing's will isn't broken, and Hannah observed piously that she trusted I realized we all of us had to be treated like babies by our Heavenly Father. I was tempted to ask her if our Heavenly Father never left us to cry in the dark. If we could be as firm with ourselves as we can be with other people, what an improvement it would be. I wonder what Tom would think of my first conflict with his baby.