hought perhaps you'd let
me adopt one....It's at the hospital...its mother is dead...and I
could...pet it, and dress it, and do things for it...and it's such a
good baby...you can ask any of the nurses...it would never, _never_
bother you by crying..."

II

Lethbury accompanied his wife to the hospital in a mood of chastened
wonder. It did not occur to him to oppose her wish. He knew, of course,
that he would have to bear the brunt of the situation: the jokes at the
club, the inquiries, the explanations. He saw himself in the comic role
of the adopted father, and welcomed it as an expiation. For in his
rapid reconstruction of the past he found himself cutting a shabbier
figure than he cared to admit. He had always been intolerant of stupid
people, and it was his punishment to be convicted of stupidity. As his
mind traversed the years between his marriage and this unexpected
assumption of paternity, he saw, in the light of an overheated
imagination, many signs of unwonted crassness. It was not that he had
ceased to think his wife stupid: she _was_ stupid, limited, inflexible;
but there was a pathos in the struggles of her swaddled mind, in its
blind reachings toward the primal emotions. He had always thought she
would have been happier with a child; but he had thought it
mechanically, because it had so often been thought before, because it
was in the nature of things to think it of every woman, because his
wife was so eminently one of a species that she fitted into all the
generalizations on the sex. But he had regarded this generalization as
merely typical of the triumph of tradition over experience. Maternity
was no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman, the one end to
which her whole organism tended; but the law of increasing complexity
had operated in both sexes, and he had not seriously supposed that,
outside the world of Christmas fiction and anecdotic art, such truisms
had any special hold on the feminine imagination. Now he saw that the
arts in question were kept alive by the vitality of the sentiments they
appealed to.

Lethbury was in fact going through a rapid process of readjustment. His
marriage had been a failure, but he had preserved toward his wife the
exact fidelity of act that is sometimes supposed to excuse any
divagation of feeling; so that, for years, the tie between them had
consisted mainly in his abstaining from making love to other women. The
abstention had not always been easy, for