der Kitty's eyes that
watched them, luminous, large and clear. Her mouth curled under Kitty's
mouth, in drowsy kisses plucked from the annihilated dream. She drew up
her rosy knees and held out her arms to Kitty's arms and smiled, half
awake and half asleep.

Kitty rose, lifting the child with her from the bed. She held her close,
pressing the tender body close to her own body with quivering hands,
stroking the adorable little face with her own face, closing her eyes
under the touch of it as she closed them when Robert's face touched
hers. She was aware that she had brought some passionate, earthly
quality of her love for Robert into her love for Robert's child.

She said to herself, "I'm terrible; there's something wrong with me.
This isn't the way to love a child."

She laid the little thing down again, freed her neck from the drowsy,
detaining arms, and covered the small body up out of her sight.
Barbara, thus abandoned, cried, and the cry cut through her heart.

She went into her own room, and threw herself on her bed and writhed
there, torn by many pangs. The pang of the heart and the pang of the
half-born spirit, struggling with the body that held it back from birth;
and through it all the pang of the motherhood she had thwarted and
disowned. Out of the very soil of corruption it pierced, sharp and pure,
infinitely painful. It was almost indiscernible from the fierce
exultation of her heart that had found fulfilment, and from the passion
of her body that yet waited for its own.

She undressed herself, and crept into her bed and lay there, tortured,
visited by many memories. She gazed with terrified, pitiful eyes into a
darkness that was peopled for her with all the faces she had known in
the short seasons of her sinning; men, and the women who had been her
friends and her companions; and the strangers who had passed her by, or
who had lingered and looked on. The faces of Robert and his children
hung somewhere on the outskirts of her vision, but she could not fix
them or hold them; they were trampled out, obliterated by that
phantasmal procession of her shames. Some faces, more terrible than all,
detached themselves and crowded round her, the faces of those who had
pursued her, and of those whom her own light feet pursued; from the
first who had found her and left her, to the last whom she herself had
held captive and let go. They stood about her bed; they stretched out
their hands and touched her; their faces