t will do you good to get away. Women in your condition,
especially if it's the first, often...."

"_My_ condition!" exclaimed Sally. It was like a blow. "Doctor!"

"Nothing to be alarmed at," he repeated. "You'll be very happy after a
bit. You know, you're going to have a baby." He stood away from her,
smiling in a friendly way.

"A baby!" Sally was shaken from head to foot. She stared at the doctor
in an extremity of horror. "A baby!"

He patted her arm. Before she was able to collect herself he had gone--a
busy doctor with a long round and a large practice. Sally sat looking
at the fire. Then she rose. A scream came to her lips. Again and again
she shuddered. A baby! A baby! Toby's baby!

xvi

The news confirmed what Sally had never consciously thought, but what
she now felt she had known for days. If anything had been needed to
complete her despair it was this. She felt suicidal. She could have
borne illness, even failure in the business, even all the complications
of distress which she had been already experiencing; but the knowledge
of ultimate disgrace so inevitable drove her mad. Vainly Sally's mind
flew in every direction for relief--the doctor might be wrong; the
coming of babies could be prevented; perhaps Gaga might never know--she
could persuade him to go away, could go away herself, could do a hundred
things to tide over the difficulty. And at the end of all these
twistings of the mind she would find herself still terribly in danger,
and would fight against hideous screaming fits by lying on the floor or
on a couch and crushing her handkerchief into her mouth. She was quite
overcome by her new disaster, the fruit of wild temptation, and the
consequence of her whole course of action. Used as Sally was to meeting
every emergency with cool shrewdness, she could not bring to her present
situation the necessary philosophy, because she was ill, and
fear-stricken, and made crazy by the impossibility of finding a solution
to her anxieties.

Hour after hour was spent with horrible nightmarish imaginings, in
frenzied self-excuses and improvised expedients. And never did there
come one moment of peace in the midst of all this panic. Sally had no
friend. More and more she began to realise this. She had no friend. She
had made use of people, they were fond of her, would submit to her; but
she had no friend. More than anything in the world she now needed a
friend. There was nobody in whom she could confide, fr