Lady with a baby inside her Kate Middleton officially debuted the rounded abdominal area of a gestating female, caused by the rapid growth and development of a tiny cluster of cells into a sassy baby with attitude — her "baby bump" — for the first time Tuesday, and everyone rejoiced that a human, at long last, was pregnant.

Last week, a paparazzo snapped pictures of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge while they were on a sexy bikini vacation, and thus, the very first shots of Middleton's baby belly were published in an Italian tabloid. But she barely looked pregnant at all in those shots. More like she had eaten a big breakfast or contracted a mild case of puppy worms.

Now, though, there can be no mistake: There is a baby on board the Stork Express and Captain Fertile Myrtle had pulled out of the station.

The Duchess made her appearance at Hope House, an addiction recovery center for women in London. Outside the center, Kate Middleton made a pretense of chatting with a few people so that photographers could snap shots of her stomach wrapped up in a wrap dress. She even kept her hands hovering over it, as if to indicate "Baby is HERE" so that people would not take pictures of the roundest part of her body (her head) by mistake.

Here's a description of the kind of antics Kate Middleton got up to inside the center, courtesy of the Telegraph:

As she chatted to women in an art therapy class, she told one of them: "Well done for getting sober."

"Do you like being sober? "Is it nice to be sober?" "Good job at sober." A truly engaging discussion.

Elsewhere Tuesday, British people had a conniption fit over some remarks Booker Prize-winning author Hilary Mantel made in a lecture for the London Review of Books earlier this month, in which she noted that Kate Middleton has a "plastic" smile, the presence of "a shop-window mannequin," and manners.

Kate seems to have been selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable: as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, without oddities, without the risk of the emergence of character.

Mantel was speaking about the public's fickle assessments of royals' lives, dating back all the way to the court of Henry VIII; Kate Middleton was more of a jumping off-point than anything, but, as in Friday recitations, most of the class did not do the reading and simply plunged into discussion blind.

The Daily Mail called Mantel's remarks "an astonishing and venomous critique" and went with the full-page headline "A PLASTIC PRINCESS DESIGNED TO BREED." The Sun labeled her essay"a bizarre rant."

Even Prime Minister David Cameron weighed in, calling Mantel's comments "completely misguided and completely wrong," inadvertently proving Mantel's point when the only nice thing he could think to say about Kate Middleton was that she looked pretty at the Olympics.

"What I've seen of Princess Kate at public events, at the Olympics and elsewhere is this is someone who's bright, who's engaging, who's a fantastic ambassador for Britain."

Following her public appearance, the Duchess was ushered back into her pink jeep and driven back to her DreamHouse™ in the tony Malibu section of London.

[Telegraph // London Review of Books // Images via AP]