hat she should not disturb Grandmother, she went down
the garden, smiling at the robust scents and colours of the flowers. She
had a feeling in those days that nature was on her side. The purplish
cabbage roses seemed to be regarding her with clucking approval and
reassurance that a group of matrons might give to a young wife. The
Dolly Perkins looked at her like a young girl wondering. The Crimson
Ramblers understood all that had happened to her. She loved to imagine
it so, for thus would people have looked at her if she had been married,
and she slightly resented for her child's sake that she was not
receiving that homage. Humming with contentment, she crossed the lane to
the wood, whose sun-dappled vistas, framed by the noble aspirant
oak-trunks, stretched before her like a promise of happiness made by
some wise, far-sighted person.

It made Marion laugh angrily, as she lay there in the bed where she had
slept so badly in the thirty years that had passed since that afternoon,
to remember how she had walked in those woods in a passion of good-will
to the world. She dreamed complimentary dreams of life, pretending that
it was not always malign. She imagined that Harry would come back before
the child was born and would cloak her in protective passion, and his
pride in her would make him take her away somewhere so that everyone
would see that he really loved her and that he did not think lightly of
her. Freely and honestly she forgave him for his present failure to come
to her. It was his mother's fault. She had made him marry when he was
twenty-one, so that he had been led to commit a physical forgery of the
spiritual fact of fatherhood by begetting children who, being born of a
woman whom he did not love, were not the children of his soul. With
aching tenderness she recalled the extreme poverty of the emotion that
showed in his eyes when he spoke of his daughters, or when, as had
happened once or twice, they had looked out of the belvedere window and
seen the little girls running by on the brow of the hill, white leggy
figures against the frieze of the distant shining waters.

It was indeed not so much emotion as a sense that in other circumstances
these things might have aroused an emotion which, with his comprehensive
greed of all that was lovely in the universe, he regretted being
without. If he had only been with her now he would have been given that,
and would have found, like her, that it is possible to be arden