acter. He saw already the error of supposing that it could work any
transformation in her. It simply magnified her existing qualities. She
was like a dried sponge put in water: she expanded, but she did not
change her shape. From the stand-point of scientific observation it was
curious to see how her stored instincts responded to the
pseudo-maternal call. She overflowed with the petty maxims of the
occasion. One felt in her the epitome, the consummation, of centuries
of animal maternity, so that this little woman, who screamed at a mouse
and was nervous about burglars, came to typify the cave-mother rending
her prey for her young.

It was less easy to regard philosophically the practical effects of her
borrowed motherhood. Lethbury found with surprise that she was becoming
assertive and definite. She no longer represented the negative side of
his life; she showed, indeed, a tendency to inconvenient affirmations.
She had gradually expanded her assumption of motherhood till it
included his own share in the relation, and he suddenly found himself
regarded as the father of Jane. This was a contingency he had not
foreseen, and it took all his philosophy to accept it; but there were
moments of compensation. For Mrs. Lethbury was undoubtedly happy for
the first time in years; and the thought that he had tardily
contributed to this end reconciled him to the irony of the means.

At first he was inclined to reproach himself for still viewing the
situation from the outside, for remaining a spectator instead of a
participant. He had been allured, for a moment, by the vision of
severed hands meeting over a cradle, as the whole body of domestic
fiction bears witness to their doing; and the fact that no such
conjunction took place he could explain only on the ground that it was
a borrowed cradle. He did not dislike the little girl. She still
remained to him a hypothetical presence, a query rather than a fact;
but her nearness was not unpleasant, and there were moments when her
tentative utterances, her groping steps, seemed to loosen the dry
accretions enveloping his inner self. But even at such moments--moments
which he invited and caressed--she did not bring him nearer to his
wife. He now perceived that he had made a certain place in his life for
Mrs. Lethbury, and that she no longer fitted into it. It was too late
to enlarge the space, and so she overflowed and encroached. Lethbury
struggled against the sense of submergence. He le