vise of
suffering.

It was a girl. The second of silence on her face when they
said so showed him she was disappointed. And a great blazing
passion of resentment and protest sprang up in his heart. In
that moment he claimed the child.

But when the milk came, and the infant sucked her breast, she
seemed to be leaping with extravagant bliss.

"It sucks me, it sucks me, it likes me--oh, it loves
it!" she cried, holding the child to her breast with her two
hands covering it, passionately.

And in a few moments, as she became used to her bliss, she
looked at the youth with glowing, unseeing eyes, and said:

"Anna Victrix."

He went away, trembling, and slept. To her, her pains were
the wound-smart of a victor, she was the prouder.

When she was well again she was very happy. She called the
baby Ursula. Both Anna and her husband felt they must have a
name that gave them private satisfaction. The baby was tawny
skinned, it had a curious downy skin, and wisps of bronze hair,
and the yellow grey eyes that wavered, and then became
golden-brown like the father's. So they called her Ursula
because of the picture of the saint.

It was a rather delicate baby at first, but soon it became
stronger, and was restless as a young eel. Anna was worn out
with the day-long wrestling with its young vigour.

As a little animal, she loved and adored it and was happy.
She loved her husband, she kissed his eyes and nose and mouth,
and made much of him, she said his limbs were beautiful, she was
fascinated by the physical form of him.

And she was indeed Anna Victrix. He could not combat her any
more. He was out in the wilderness, alone with her. Having
occasion to go to London, he marvelled, as he returned, thinking
of naked, lurking savages on an island, how these had built up
and created the great mass of Oxford Street or Piccadilly. How
had helpless savages, running with their spears on the
riverside, after fish, how had they come to rear up this great
London, the ponderous, massive, ugly superstructure of a world
of man upon a world of nature! It frightened and awed him. Man
was terrible, awful in his works. The works of man were more
terrible than man himself, almost monstrous.

And yet, for his own part, for his private being, Brangwen
felt that the whole of the man's world was exterior and
extraneous to his own real life with Anna. Sweep away the whole
monstrous superstructure of the world of to-day, cities and
industri