d say Good-night, she found him sitting up, smiling and ready.

"Mummy," he said, "I think I ought to tell you. It isn't a bit of good
sending me to bed."

"I should have thought it was, myself," said Frances. She almost
suspected Nicky of insincerity.

"So it would have been," he assented, "if I didn't 'vent things. You
see, I just lie still 'venting things all the time. I've 'vented three
things since tea: a thing to make Daddy's bikesickle stand still with
Daddy on it; a thing to squeeze corks out of bottles; and a thing to
make my steam-engine go faster. That isn't a punishment, is it, Mummy?"

* * * * *

They said that Nicky would grow out of it. But two more years passed and
Nicky was still the same.

And yet he was not the same. And Dorothy, and Michael and John were not
the same.

For the awful thing about your children was that they were always dying.
Yes, dying. The baby Nicky was dead. The child Dorothy was dead and in
her place was a strange big girl. The child Michael was dead and in his
place was a strange big boy. And Frances mourned over the passing of
each age. You could no more bring back that unique loveliness of two
years old, of five years old, of seven, than you could bring back the
dead. Even John-John was not a baby any more; he spoke another language
and had other feelings; he had no particular affection for his mother's
knee. Frances knew that all this dying was to give place to a more
wonderful and a stronger life. But it was not the same life; and she
wanted to have all their lives about her, enduring, going on, at the
same time. She did not yet know that the mother of babies and the mother
of boys and girls must die if the mother of men and women is to be born.

Thoughts came to Frances now that troubled her tranquillity.

Supposing, after all, the children shouldn't grow up as she wanted them
to?

There was Nicky. She could do nothing with him; she could make no
impression on him.

There was Michael. She couldn't make him out. He loved them, and showed
that he loved them; but it was by caresses, by beautiful words, by rare,
extravagant acts of renunciation, inconsistent with his self-will; not
by anything solid and continuous. There was a softness in Michael that
distressed and a hardness that perplexed her. You could make an
impression on Michael--far too easily--and the impression stayed. You
couldn't obliterate it. Michael's memory was terrible