ped, that Amanda found herself faced by foregone
conclusions. He was ready now even with the details of his project. She
should go on with her life in London exactly as she had planned it. He
would take fifteen hundred a year for himself and all the rest she might
spend without check or stint as it pleased her. He was going round the
world for one or two years. It was even possible he would not go alone.
There was a man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don
called Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out
his ideas....

To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things should
happen.

She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily
told her that this only hardened his heart. She perceived that she must
make a softer appeal. Now of a set intention she began to revive and
imitate the spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she perceived for the
first time clearly how wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to
bear a child. "He cannot go if I am going to have a child," she told
herself. But that would mean illness, and for illness in herself or
others Amanda had the intense disgust natural to her youth. Yet even
illness would be better than this intolerable publication of her
husband's ability to leave her side....

She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself forthwith
to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate it to him. Her
dread of illness disappeared; her desire for offspring grew.

"Yes," he said, "I want to have children, but I must go round the world
none the less."

She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind. She
argued with persistence and repetition. And then suddenly so that she
was astonished at herself, there came a moment when she ceased to argue.

She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out upon the park, and she
was now so intent upon her purpose as to be still and self-forgetful;
she was dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale green, that set off
her slim erect body and the strong clear lines of her neck and shoulders
very beautifully, some greenish stones caught a light from without and
flashed soft whispering gleams from amidst the misty darkness of her
hair. She was going to Lady Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for
a dinner at the House with some young Liberals at which he was to meet
two representative Indians with a grievance from Bengal. Husb