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forehead, even though it was a cool spring day on the Riviera. He was glad that he had the

room to himself; at times, when somebody came through, he would lower his eyes to his book

and pretend to be absorbed. But if it was one of the nurses, he couldn't keep from stealing a

glance, hoping that it was the nurse and the moment. The woman would smile; the conventions

permitted her to smile at a handsome young gentleman, but did not permit her to go into

obstetrical details. "Tout va bien, monsieur. Soyez tranquille." In such places the wheel of life

revolves on schedule; those who tend the machinery acquire a professional attitude, their phrases

become standardized, and you have mass production of politeness as well as of babies.

III

Lanny Budd was summoned to the telephone. It was Pietro Corsatti, Italian-born American

who represented a New York newspaper in Rome and was having a vacation on the Riviera. He

had once done Lanny a favor, and now had been promised one in return. "Pete" was to have the

news the moment it happened; but it refused to happen, and maybe wasn't going to happen. "I

know how you feel," said the correspondent, sympathetically. "I've been through it."

"It's been four hours!" exclaimed the outraged young husband.

"It may be four more, and it may be twenty-four. Don't take it too hard. It's happened a lot of

times." The well-known cynicism of the journalist.

Lanny returned to his seat, thinking about an Italian-American with a strong Brooklyn accent

who had pushed his way to an important newspaper position, and had so many funny stories

to tell about the regime fascista and its leaders, whom, oddly enough, he called "wops." One of

his best stories was about how he had become the guide, philosopher, and friend of a New York

"glamour girl" who had got herself engaged to a fascinating aristocrat in Rome and had then made

the discovery that he was living with the ballerina of the opera and had no idea of giving her up.

The American girl had broken down and wept in Pete's presence, asking him what to do, and

he had told her: "Take a plane and fly straight to Lanny Budd, and ask him to marry you in

spite of the fact that you are too rich!"

It is tough luck when a journalist cannot publish his best story. Pete hadn't been asked not to,

but, all the same, he hadn't, so now Lanny was his friend for life, and would go out of his way

to give him a break whenever he could. They talked as pals, and Lanny didn't mind telling

what only a few of his friends knew, that Irma had done exactly what Pete had said, and she and

Lanny had been married on the day she had found him in London. As the Brooklyn dialect had

it, they had "gone right to it," and here was the result nine months later: Lanny sitting in a

reception-room of an hospice de la maternité, awaiting the arrival of Sir Stork, the blessed

event, the little bundle from heaven—he knew the phrases, because he and Irma had been in New

York and had read the "tabs" and listened to "radio reporters" shooting out gossip and slang

with the rapid-fire effect of a Budd machine gun.

Lanny had promised Pete a scoop; something not so difficult, because French newspapermen

were not particularly active in the pursuit of the knightly stork; the story might be cabled back

to Paris for the English language papers there. Lanny had hobnobbed with the correspondents

so much that he could guess what Pete would send in his "cablese" and how it would appear

dressed up by the rewrite man in the sweet land of liberty. Doubtless Pete had already sent a

"flash," and readers of that morning's newspapers were learning that Mrs. Lanny Budd, who

was Irma Barnes, the glamour girl of last season, was in a private hospital in Cannes awaiting

the blessed event.

The papers would supply the apposite details: that Irma was the only daughter of J.

Paramount Barnes, recently deceased utilities magnate, who had left her the net sum of twenty-

three million dollars; that her mother was one of the New York Vandringhams, and her uncle was

Horace Vandringham, Wall Street manipulator cleaned out in the recent market collapse; that

Irma's own fortune was said to have been cut in half, but she still owned a palatial estate on

Long Island, to which she was expected to return. The papers would add that the expectant

father was the son of Robert Budd of Budd Gunmakers Corporation of Newcastle, Connecticut;

that his mother was the famous international beauty, widow of Marcel Detaze, the French

painter whose work had created a sensation in New York last fall. Such details were eagerly

read by a public which lived upon the doings of the rich, as the ancient Greeks had lived upon

the affairs of the immortals who dwelt upon the snowy top of Mount Olympus.

IV

Lanny would have preferred that his child should be born outside the limelight, but he knew it

wasn't possible; this stream of electrons, or waves, or whatever it was, would follow Irma on

her travels—so long as she had the other half of her fortune. As a matter of fact the fortune

wasn't really diminished, for everybody else had lost half of his or hers, so the proportions

remained the same. Irma Barnes still enjoyed the status of royalty, and so did the fortunate

young man whom she had chosen for her prince consort. In the days of the ancien regime,

when a child was born to the queen of France it had been the long-established right of noblemen

and ladies to satisfy themselves that it was a real heir to the throne and no fraud; no stork

stories were accepted, but they witnessed with their own eyes the physical emergence of the

infant dauphin. Into the chamber of Marie Antoinette they crowded in such swarms that the

queen cried out that she was suffocating, and the king opened a window with his own hands. It

wasn't quite that bad now with the queen of the Barnes estate, but it was a fact that the

newspaper-reading and radio-listening public would have welcomed hourly bulletins as to what

was going on in this hospice de la maternité.

But, damn it, even Lanny himself didn't know what was going on! What was the use of

planning what to say to newspaper reporters about the heir or heiress apparent to the Barnes

fortune, when it refused so persistently to make itself apparent, and for all the prince consort

knew the surgeon might be engaged in a desperate struggle with a "cross-birth," or perhaps

having to cut the infant to pieces, or perform a Caesarean section to save its life! Lanny dug his

fingernails into the palms of his hands, and got up and began to pace the floor. Every time he

turned toward the bell-button in the reception-room he had an impulse to press it. He was

paying for service, and wasn't receiving it, and he was getting up steam to demand it. But just

at that juncture a nurse came through the room, cast one of her conventional smiles upon him,

and remarked: "Soyez tranquille, monsieur. Tout va bien."

V

Lanny called his mother on the telephone. Beauty Budd had been through this adventure two

and a half times—so she said—and spoke as one having authority. There wasn't a thing he

could do, so why not come home and have something to eat, instead of worrying himself and

getting in other people's way? This was the woman's job, and nobody in all creation was so

superfluous as the husband. Lanny answered that he wasn't hungry, and he wasn't being

allowed to bother anybody.

He went back to his seat in the reception-room, and thought about ladies. They were, as a