"I scarcely know."

"I mean do they concentrate on the child a long while before it comes."

"Many smart women certainly don't."

"Oh, smart women! I mean women."

"A good definition, dee-ar. Well, lots of poor women don't concentrate
on the child either. They have far too much to do and worry about. They
are 'seeing to' things up till the very last moment."

"Then we must rule them out. Let's say the good women who have the
time."

"I expect a great many of them do, if the husband lets them."

"Ah!" said Dion rather sharply.

"There are a few husbands, you see, who get fidgety directly the
pedestal on which number one thinks himself firmly established begins to
shake."

"Stupid fools!"

"Eminently human stupid fools."

"Are they?"

"Don't you think so?"

"Perhaps. But then humanity's contemptible."

"Extra-humanity, or the attempt at it, can be dangerous."

"What do you mean exactly by that, mater?"

"Only that we have to be as we are, and can never really be, can only
seem to be, as we aren't."

"What a whipping I'm giving to myself just now!" was her thought, as she
finished speaking.

"Oh--yes, of course. That's true. I think--I think Rosamund's
concentrating on the child, in a sort of quiet, big way."

"There's something fine in that. But her doings are often touched with
fineness."

"Yes, aren't they? She doesn't seem at all afraid."

"I don't think she need be. She has such splendid health."

"But she may suffer very much."

"Yes, but something will carry her gloriously through all that, I
expect."

"And you think it's very natural, very usual, her--her sort of living
alone with the child before it is born?"

Mrs. Leith saw in her son's eyes an unmistakably wistful look at this
moment. It was very hard for her not to take him in her arms just then,
not to say, "My son, d'you suppose I don't understand it all--_all_?"
But she never moved, her hands lay still in her lap, and she replied:

"Very natural, quite natural, Dion. Your Rosamund is just being
herself."

"You think she's able to live with the child already?"

Mrs. Leith hesitated for a moment. In that moment certainly she felt a
strong, even an almost terrible inclination to tell a lie to her son.
But she answered:

"Yes, I do."

"That must be very strange," was all that Dion said just then; but a
little later on--he stayed with his mother longer than usual that day
because poor little Omar was dead--he remarked: