tly in
love with an unknown person. She was so sorry he was not here. But she
knew that he would come soon, and then he would have the joy of seeing
his true child, the child of his soul, and beyond the spiritual joy that
must come of that relationship he would have the delight of the
exquisite being she knew she was going to bring forth. For she knew then
perfectly what Richard was going to be like. She knew she was going to
have a son; she knew that he would have black, devout and sensitive
eyes. She knew that he would be passionate and intractable and yet held
to nobility by fastidiousness and love of her. She imagined how some day
in a wood like this, but set in a kinder countryside, Harry would kneel
in a sunlit clearing, his special quality of gaiety playing about him
like another kind of sunshine, while there staggered towards him their
beautiful dark child. He would miss nothing then, except this time of
acquaintance with the unborn, and perhaps he would not even miss that,
for no doubt he would make her the mother of other children.

At that thought she stood still and leaned back against the trunk of a
tree and closed her eyes and smiled triumphantly, and ran her hands down
her body, planning that it should perform this miracle again and again
and people her world with lovely, glowing, disobedient sons and
daughters. She felt her womb as an inexhaustible treasure. Slowly,
swimmingly, in a golden drowse of exultation, she moved on among the
trees till she came to the wood's end, and looked across the waste patch
scattered with knots of bramble and gorse at the yellow brick backs of
the houses in Roothing High Street and knew she must go no further. For
the feeling against her was very high in the village. They had told the
most foul stories of her; it was as if they had been waiting anxiously
for an excuse to talk of sexual things that they might let loose the
unclean fantasies that they had kept tied up in the stables of their
mind, that these might meet in the streets and breed, and take home
litters filthier than themselves. Men and women told tales that they
could not have believed simply that they might evoke before their minds,
and strengthened by the vital force of the listeners' hot-eared
excitement, pictures of a strong man and a fine girl living like beasts
in the fields. Not only did they tell lies of how they had watched her
and Harry among the bracken, they said she had been seduced by the young
do