"But a mock-marriage does not make a wife, Mistress Megges, and, alas! the poor babe, if ever it should be born, will be but a bastard, marked from its birth with the brand of shame." Now, the Flounder, who was no fool, began to take her cue.
"It is sad, very sad, your Holiness--no, that's wrong; but never mind, it will be right before all's done, and a good omen, I say, coming so sudden and chancy--your Lordship, I mean--not but what there's lots of the sort about here, as is generally the case round a--I mean everywhere.

Moreover, they generally grow up bad and ungrateful, as I know well from my own three--not but what, of course, I was married fast enough.

Well, what I was going to say was, that when things is so, sometimes it is a true blessing if the little innocents should go off at the first, and so be spared the finger of shame and the sniff of scorn," and she paused.
"Yes, Mistress Megges, or at least in such a case it is not for us to rail at the decree of Heaven--provided, of course, that the infant has lived long enough to be baptized," he added hastily.
"No, your Eminence, no.

That's just what I said to that Smith girl last spring, when, being a heavy sleeper, I happened to overlie her brat and woke up to find it flat and blue.

When she saw it she took on, bellowing like a heifer that has lost its first calf, and I said to her, 'Mary, this isn't me; it's Heaven.