ill to fall in with Louis's preconceived notions;
living an absolutely normal, rather tough life, hardened by her
father's Spartanism, she found that a natural process made very little
difference to her. To Louis's real distress she swam in the lake every
morning; what he could not understand was that she had scarcely, even
yet, awakened to consciousness of her body. Once or twice in her queer
ecstasies, once or twice in Sydney the sleep within her had stirred and
stretched and opened her eyes; from the force of the stirring and
stretching she had gathered an impression of something immensely strong.
But it had not yet risen and walked about her life yet.

One day she went across the clearing to Louis, through the smoke wreaths
that were being gently swayed to and fro by a soft wind. In a blue shirt
open at the neck, shewing a triangle of brown chest, he looked very
different from the effeminate Louis of the _Oriana_. Just as she reached
him, looking at him instead of the rough ground, all rutted with uptorn
roots, she slipped and almost fell. In an instant his arm, taut and
strong, was round her. She laughed and drew away from him.

"I was looking at you coming along here, Marcella," he said. "Do you
know what you remind me of?"

"Dinner?" she said, sitting down to unpack the basket of food.

"No--a Maori woman."

"Louis! A savage?"

"They aren't savages. But after all, savage doesn't mean anything but
wild, untamed. You're that, you know, old lady. Untamed even by
motherhood. And I'd have thought that would have tamed even Petruchio's
handful. But this Maori woman I was thinking about was in the King
Country in New Zealand--You know, I'd read 'The Blue Lagoon' and thought
it a bit overdrawn."

"What is it?" she interrupted, pointing to the food imperiously.

"It's about a girl and a boy living on a desert island, and she has a
baby without turning a hair. Remembering my nerve-racking experience of
maternity in the Borough I thought Stacpoole was rather talking without
his book. But when I saw this Maori I felt like sending him my humble
apologies by wireless. The tribe was trekking. I was with them for
months, you know, in the Prohibition Country. My diagnostic eye had
foreseen a birthday and, as a matter of fact, I was getting rather funky
and wishing I had Hermann's 'Midwifery' to swot up. I saw myself the
hero of the occasion, don't you know, dashing in to save her life, miles
from civilization. One mornin