ug it softly in the ribs. He understood this
baby. However many little Yids Jane might achieve in the future, there
would be this little Potter to carry on his own dreams.

Clare came to see it. She was glad it wasn't like Oliver; Jane saw her
being glad of that. She was beginning to fall in love with a young
naval officer, but still she couldn't have seen Oliver in Jane's child
without wincing.

Gideon came to see it. He laughed.

'Potter for ever,' he said.

He added. 'It's symbolic. Potters will be for ever, you know. They're so
strong....'

The light from the foggy winter afternoon fell on his face as he sat by
the window. He looked tired and perplexed. Strength, perpetuity, seemed
things remote from him, belonging only to Potters. Anti-Potterism and the
_Weekly Fact_ were frail things of a day, rooted in a dream. So Gideon
felt, on these days when the fog closed about him....

Jane looked at her son, the strange little animal, and thought not
'Potter for ever,' but 'me for ever,' as was natural, and as parents will
think of their young, who will carry them down the ages in an ever more
distant but never lost immortality, an atom of dust borne on the hurrying
stream. Jane, who believed in no other personal immortality, found it in
this little Potter in her arms. Holding him close, she loved him, in a
curious, new, physical way. So this was motherhood, this queer, sensuous,
cherishing love. It would have been a pity not to have known it; it was,
after all, an emotion, more profound than most.

2

When Jane was well enough, she gave a party for Charles, as if he had
been a new picture she had painted and wanted to show off. Her friends
came and looked at him, and thought how clever of her to have had him,
all complete and alive and jolly like that, a real baby. He was better
than the books and things they wrote, because he was more alive, and
would also last longer, with luck. Their books wouldn't have a run of
four score years and ten or whatever it was; they'd be lucky if any one
thought of them again in five years.

But partly Jane gave the party to show people that Charles didn't
monopolise her, that she was well and active again, and ready for work
and life. If she wasn't careful, she might come to be regarded as the
mere mother, and dropped out.

Johnny said, grinning amiably at her and Charles, 'Ah, you're
thinking that your masterpiece quite puts mine in the shade, aren't
you, old thing.'

He