my temper with Mrs. Winter. But the blasphemy, the silly
blasphemy of coming from a woman who has just lost her baby and talking
of the kindness of God!..." The tears she had held back since they had
parted with the vicar's wife ran down her cheeks. It must, she thought,
be the worst thing in the world to lose an only child. Surely there
could be nothing worse in all the range of human experience than having
to let them take away the thing that belongs to one's arms and put it in
a coffin. There would be a pain of the body as unparalleled, as unlike
any other physical feeling, as the pains of birth, and there would be
tormenting fundamental miseries that would eat at the root of peace. A
woman whose only child has died has failed for the time being in that
work of giving life which is her only justification for existence, and
so her unconscious mind would try to pretend that it had not happened
and she would find herself unable to believe that the baby was really
dead, and she would feel as if she had let them bury it alive. All this
Marion knew, because for one instant she had tried to imagine what it
would have been like if Richard had died when he was little, and now
this knowledge made her feel ashamed because she was the mother of a
living and unsurpassable son and there existed so close at hand a woman
who was having to spend the day in a house in one room of which lay a
baby's coffin.

And it was such a horrid house too. Sorrow there would take a sickly and
undignified form. For the Coltsfoot bungalow was unusually ugly even for
an Essex small-holding. A broken balustrade round the verandah, heavy
wooden gables, and an ingeniously large amount of inferior stained
timbering gave it an air of having been built in order to find a last
fraudulent use for a suite of furniture that had been worn out by a long
succession of purchasers who failed to complete agreement under the hire
system. There were Nottingham lace curtains in the windows, the gate was
never latched and swung on its hinges, nagging the paint off the
gate-post, at each gust of wind. If one passed in the rain there was
always some tool lying out in the wet. Ugliness was the order of the day
there, and it was impossible to believe that the owners were anything
but weak-eyed, plain people.

The baby had not really been pretty at all. Mrs. Winter's tribute to it
had only been the automatic response to all aspects of child life which
is cultivated by the w