nights
running, and the doctor came twice a day. And every time, except on the
last night, when the Baby nearly died, the doctor spoke brutally to
Violet. _He_ knew that gentleness was not a bit of good.

CHAPTER XVIII

Still, that was in August, and they could put a good half of it down to
the hot weather.

Besides, the Baby got over it. With all its accusing and witnessing, it
was, as Ranny said, a forgiving little thing; it had never in its life
done anybody any harm. It did not hurt Violet now.

And the hot days passed; weeks passed; months passed, and winter and
spring. The Baby had one little attack after another. It marked the
passage of the months by its calamities; and still these might be put
down to the cold weather or the stress of teething. Then, in a temperate
week of May, nineteen-six, it did something decisive. It nearly died
again of enteritis; and again it was forgiving and got over it.

There could be no doubt that things would have been simpler if it had
been cruel enough to die. For the question was: What were they to do
now?

Things, Ransome said, had got to be different. They couldn't go on as
they were. The anxiety and the discomfort were intolerable. Still, that
he had conceived an end to them, showed that he did not yet utterly
despair of Violet. She had been terrified by the behavior of the Baby
and by the things, the brutal things, the doctor had said to her, and
she had made another effort. Ransome's trouble was simply that he
couldn't trust her. He said to himself that she had good instincts and
good impulses if you could depend on them. But you couldn't. With all
her obstinacy she had no staying-power. He recognized in her a
lamentable and inveterate flabbiness.

If he had known all about her he might have formed a larger estimate of
her staying-power. But he did not yet know what she was. That bad word
that he had once let out through the window had been in Ranny's simple
mind a mere figure of speech, a flowering expletive, flung to the dark,
devoid of meaning and of fitness. He did not know what Violet's impulses
and her instincts really were. He did not know that what he called her
flabbiness was the inertia in which they stored their strength, nor that
in them there remained a vigilant and indestructible soul, biding its
time, holding its own against maternity, making more and more for
self-protection, for assertion, for supremacy. He felt her mystery, but
he had never