er
it was announced that for the first time in its history Torque Hall had
been let furnished, and that the family was going to spend the next
twelve months abroad and in London, did her heart ache to think he must
be sad to leave the grey, salt Essex which he loved. She thought of it,
indeed, but negligently. She could imagine well how he had walked with
his dogs among the dripping woods and had set his face against a
tree-trunk near some remembered place, and had wept (for like most very
virile men, he wept in sorrow); and when he had gone home, thick-lipped
and darkly flushed with misery, he had flung down his stick on the chest
in the hall and muttered, while frightened people watched from the
shadows of the armour or listened at doors held ajar, "I must get out of
this." No doubt it was very sad, but it was simple; it was brother to
the grief of the yard dog when she lost her puppies. It was not like her
agony. Nothing was simple there. Destiny had struck her being a blow
that had shivered it to fragments, and now all warred so that there was
confusion, and the best things were bad.

Her body was full of health and she was very beautiful. Richard, who was
beginning to take notice, took great pleasure in her. He used to point
his fingers at her great lustrous eyes as he did at flowers, and he
would roll his face against the smooth skin of her neck and shoulders;
and when he was naked after his bath he liked her to let down her hair
so that it hung round him like a dark, scented tent. But as she bent
forward, watching his little red gums shine in his laughing mouth, guilt
constricted her heart. For she knew that no woman who was going to have
a child had any right to be as well as she was. She knew that it meant
that she was giving nothing to the child, that the blood was bright in
her cheeks because she was denying every drop she could to the child,
that her flesh was nice for Richard to kiss because she was electric
with the force she should have spent in making nerves for the child. She
knew that she was trying to kill the thing to which she had been ordered
to give life; that the murder was being committed by a part of her which
was beyond the control of her will did not exonerate her. In these
matters, as she had learned in the moment when she had discovered that
her baby had conceived without the consent of her soul, the soul cannot
with honour disown the doings of the body. The plain fact was that she
was goin