Whatever her mother may have thought about the world, it was perfectly obvious that Frances Evelyn considered her part in it remarkably jolly.

To be a well baby in an amiable universe was her ideal of felicity.
When George came up to luncheon, which he did sometimes now, he went straight to the nursery for a glimpse of his daughter.

Ever since little Frances had lost her first hair and gained her golden down, he had taken an interest in the rapid stages of her development; and, though he never "wasted time," as he said, in the nursery, he liked to look in once a day and see whether or not she had changed in the night.
On her side the baby treated her father as if he were an inexhaustible family joke, to be enjoyed not too seriously, but with a polite recognition of its humorous points.

If she were sucking her bottle when he entered, she immediately stopped and laughed at him while the rubber nipple dropped from her toothless gums; if she awoke and discovered him at the side of her crib, she greeted him with subdued but inappeasable merriment; if he lifted her in his arms, her crocheted shoes could barely contain the kicks of her ecstatic feet.

And because she was a jolly little beggar, George grew, after a time, to cherish a certain fondness for her.