en which hers stood. She was the
primitive woman, a mechanism of elemental instincts, moving up an
incline of progressive passions. The love of her father had filled her
youth, and that had given way to the love of her mate, which in time
would dim before the love of her child. Outside these phases of a
governing prepossession--filial, conjugal, maternal--she knew nothing,
felt nothing, and could see nothing.

Low, at first, had brooded over her with an almost ferocious
tenderness. Had she demanded a removal to the town he would have given
way. He would have acceded to anything she asked, but she asked
nothing. As the time passed her demands of him, even to his help in
small matters of the household, grew less. A slight, inscrutable
change had come over her: she was less responsive, often held him with
an eye whose blankness told of inner imaginings, when he spoke made no
answer, concentrated in her reverie. When he watched her withdrawn in
these dreams, or in a sudden attack of industry, fashioning small
garments from her hoarded store of best clothes, he felt an alienation
in her, and he realized with a start of alarmed divination that the
child would take a part of what had been his, steal from him something
of that blind devotion in the eternal possession of which he had
thought to find solace.

It was a shock that roused him to a scared scrutiny of the future. He
put questions to her for the purpose of drawing out her ideas, and her
answers showed that all her thoughts and plans were gathering round the
welfare of her baby. Her desire for its good was to end her
unresisting subservience to him. She was thinking already of better
things. Ambitions were awakened that would carry her out of the
solitudes, where he felt himself at rest, back to the world where she
would struggle to make a place for the child she had never wanted for
herself.

"We'll take him to San Francisco soon"--it was always "him" in her
speculations--"We can't keep him here."

"Why not?" he asked. "Look at Bella's children. Could anything be
healthier and happier?"

"Bella's children are different. Bella's different. She doesn't know
anything better, she doesn't care. To have them well fed and healthy
is enough for her. _We're_ not like that. _Our_ child's going to have
everything."

"You're content enough here by yourself and you're a different sort to
Bella."

"For myself!" she gave a shrug. "I don't care any more t