deliberate on their part. While it remains an only child,
it is one against two, which is not a natural handicap; and
the parents, equally, suffer, since it requires more than
one infant to educate a pair of adults properly, and no
one denies that parents are more or less helpless at first.

In any event, therefore, the hardest work is thrown
upon their firstborn, and thus even the first child of a
large family is fated to the position of an only child, for
at least the first eighteen months of its life. While we
still know too little of biometrics (an ugly word, partly
because it remains ill-defined) to dogmatize, some such
writers as Havelock Ellis or Galton have averred that the
best chance in the family falls to the youngest, if only
because the youngest is not born until the parents have
had time to learn a thing or two. The Benjamin of a
family runs, indeed, some risk of being spoilt, but any
weakness of the parents in this direction is corrected by
the jealousy of their elder children, who are apt to squash
the youngest because he is least able to defend himself.
So long as the youngest is not an afterthought of middle
age, has not been born at too long an interval after his
brothers and sisters, he has probably the best chance of
any, just as the eldest, however well he may ripen, had the
worst. From the point of view of the children, the smallest
family should consist of three. In the first place, the two
parents are better when outnumbered, and, in the second,
as the late Dr. W. C. Rivers, a good observer, remarked,
two surviving children only replace their parents, while
a third child is a convenient precaution against accidents. ¹

Wider problems than those of the individual child, the
parents, the family unit, though not to be neglected,
need not here detain us. The character which is to be
watched as it unfolded was that of a little girl, who began
her life as an eldest child, and was fated to remain alone.

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