g to have a child, and that she was trying to kill it. Remorse
dragged behind her like a brake on the swift movements of her happy
motherhood; and at night she lay wide-eyed and whispered to some judge
to judge her and bring this matter to an end.

It was no wonder that even when a solicitor came to see her and told her
that Harry had settled on her and Richard a sum so large that she knew
he must be deeply concerned for her, since, like many men of his type,
he had such an abundant sense of the pleasures which can be bought with
money that to part with it unnecessarily was a real sacrifice, she
thought of him with only such casual pity as she had felt when the
yard-dog howled. Well, that had all been set right, long afterwards on
that day of which she had told nobody.

But she had cheered herself in all those nights that she would make up
for her body's defection by loving the child very much when it was born.
She knew she would have no passion for it as she had for Richard, but
she foresaw herself being consciously and slantingly tender over it,
like a primitive Madonna over the Holy Child. There was, of course, no
such solution of the problem. It became plain that there was not going
to be in that hour when she knew the unnatural horror of a painless
parturition. She had not been at all shocked by the violence she had
endured at Richard's birth. It had seemed magnificently consistent with
the rest of nature, and she had been comforted as she lay moaning by a
persistent vision of a harrow turning up rich earth. But contemplating
herself as she performed this act of childbirth without a pang was like
looking into eyes which are open but have no sight and realising that
here is blindness, or listening to one who earnestly speaks words which
have no meaning and realising that here is madness.

She was going through a process that should have produced life: but
because of the lack of some essence which works through pain, but
nevertheless is to the breeding womb what sight is to the eye or sanity
to the brain, it was producing something that was as much at variance
with life as death. The old women at her bedside chuckled and rubbed
their hands because she was having such an easy time, but that was
because they were old and had forgotten. If a young woman had been
there she would have stood at the other side of the room between the
windows, as far away from the bed as she could, and her lips would have
pursed, as if she