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“But it might be very inconvenient for someone else, in an ordinary home, to wait so interminably for him to learn to wait on himself.”

Her answer was a home-thrust. “If it’s too much trouble to give him the best conditions at home, wouldn’t he be better sent to a Casa dei Bambini, which has no other aim than to have things just right for his development?”

This silenced me for a time. I turned away, but was recalled by her remarking, “Besides, I’ve put him more in the way of getting his soup hot from now on, than you would, by tucking in his napkin and sending him back at once. To-day’s plateful would have been warm; but how about to-morrow and the day after, and so on, unless you, or some other grown-up happened to be at hand to wait on him. And on my part, what could I do, if all twenty-five of the children were helpless?”

I seized on this opportunity to voice some of the mother’s jealousy which underlay all my extreme admiration and astonishment at the sights of the morning, “If you didn’t keep such an octopus clutch on the children, separating them all day in this way from their own families, if they were sent home to eat their luncheons, why, there would be mothers enough to go around. They would be only too glad to tuck the little napkins in!”