agement with Skrebensky. They looked blank and
angry. But she could not feel any more.

The weeks crawled by in apathy. He would have sailed for
India now. She was scarcely interested. She was inert, without
strength or interest.

Suddenly a shock ran through her, so violent that she thought
she was struck down. Was she with child? She had been so
stricken under the pain of herself and of him, this had never
occurred to her. Now like a flame it took hold of her limbs and
body. Was she with child?

In the first flaming hours of wonder, she did not know what
she felt. She was as if tied to the stake. The flames were
licking her and devouring her. But the flames were also good.
They seemed to wear her away to rest. What she felt in her heart
and her womb she did not know. It was a kind of swoon.

Then gradually the heaviness of her heart pressed and pressed
into consciousness. What was she doing? Was she bearing a child?
Bearing a child? To what?

Her flesh thrilled, but her soul was sick. It seemed, this
child, like the seal set on her own nullity. Yet she was glad in
her flesh that she was with child. She began to think, that she
would write to Skrebensky, that she would go out to him, and
marry him, and live simply as a good wife to him. What did the
self, the form of life matter? Only the living from day to day
mattered, the beloved existence in the body, rich, peaceful,
complete, with no beyond, no further trouble, no further
complication. She had been wrong, she had been arrogant and
wicked, wanting that other thing, that fantastic freedom, that
illusory, conceited fulfilment which she had imagined she could
not have with Skrebensky. Who was she to be wanting some
fantastic fulfilment in her life? Was it not enough that she had
her man, her children, her place of shelter under the sun? Was
it not enough for her, as it had been enough for her mother? She
would marry and love her husband and fill her place simply. That
was the ideal.

Suddenly she saw her mother in a just and true light. Her
mother was simple and radically true. She had taken the life
that was given. She had not, in her arrogant conceit, insisted
on creating life to fit herself. Her mother was right,
profoundly right, and she herself had been false, trashy,
conceited.

A great mood of humility came over her, and in this humility
a bondaged sort of peace. She gave her limbs to the bondage, she
loved the bondage, she called it peace. In this