--" said Alvina.

"Oh, but so many things happen outside one's imagination. That's
where your body has you. I can't _imagine_ that I'm going to have a
child--" She lowered her eyelids wearily and sardonically over her
large eyes.

Mrs. Tuke was the wife of the son of a local manufacturer. She was
about twenty-eight years old, pale, with great dark-grey eyes and an
arched nose and black hair, very like a head on one of the lovely
Syracusan coins. The odd look of a smile which wasn't a smile, at
the corners of the mouth, the arched nose, and the slowness of the
big, full, classic eyes gave her the dangerous Greek look of the
Syracusan women of the past: the dangerous, heavily-civilized women
of old Sicily: those who laughed about the latomia.

"But do you think you can have a child without wanting it _at all_?"
asked Alvina.

"Oh, but there isn't _one bit_ of me wants it, not _one bit_. My
_flesh_ doesn't want it. And my mind doesn't--yet there it is!" She
spread her fine hands with a flicker of inevitability.

"Something must want it," said Alvina.

"Oh!" said Mrs. Tuke. "The universe is one big machine, and we're
just part of it." She flicked out her grey silk handkerchief, and
dabbed her nose, watching with big, black-grey eyes the fresh face
of Alvina.

"There's not _one bit_ of me concerned in having this child," she
persisted to Alvina. "My flesh isn't concerned, and my mind isn't.
And _yet_!--_le voila!_--I'm just _plante_. I can't _imagine_ why I
married Tommy. And yet--I did--!" She shook her head as if it was
all just beyond her, and the pseudo-smile at the corners of her
ageless mouth deepened.

Alvina was to nurse Mrs. Tuke. The baby was expected at the end of
August. But already the middle of September was here, and the baby
had not arrived.

The Tukes were not very rich--the young ones, that is. Tommy wanted
to compose music, so he lived on what his father gave him. His
father gave him a little house outside the town, a house furnished
with expensive bits of old furniture, in a way that the townspeople
thought insane. But there you are--Effie would insist on dabbing a
rare bit of yellow brocade on the wall, instead of a picture, and in
painting apple-green shelves in the recesses of the whitewashed wall
of the dining-room. Then she enamelled the hall-furniture yellow,
and decorated it with curious green and lavender lines and flowers,
and had unearthly cushions and Sardinian pottery with unspeak