features would be falling apart, unorganised into a coherent face by any
expression, as common children's do. The situation was trodden into the
mud. They would pass on--their hearts sunk deeper into dingy
acquiescence in their separation.

Nevertheless she did not fail in her duty towards Roger. So far as
externals went she was even a better mother to him than to Richard.
Frequently she lost her temper with Richard when he ran out of the house
into the fields at bedtime, or when he would not leave his tin soldiers
to get ready for his walk, but she was always mild with Roger, though
his habit of sniffing angered her more than Richard's worst piece of
naughtiness. She took Richard's illnesses lightly and sensibly. But when
Roger ailed--which was very often, for he caught colds easily and had a
weak digestion--she would send for the doctor at once, and would nurse
him with a strained impeccability, concentrating with unnecessary
intensity on the minutiae of his treatment and diet as if she were
attempting to exclude from her mind some thought that insisted on
presenting itself at these times. When they came to her on winter
evenings and wet days and asked for a story, she would choose more often
to tell them a fairy-tale, which only Roger liked, rather than to start
one of the sagas which Richard loved, and would help to invent,
concerning the adventures of the family in some previous animal
existence, when they had all been rabbits and lived in a burrow in the
park at Torque Hall, or crocodiles who slooshed about in the Thames
mud, or lions and tigers with a lair on Kerith Island. She never gave
any present to Richard without giving one to Roger too; she dressed him
as carefully in the same woollen and linen suits, although in nothing
did he look well. Never had she lifted her hand against him.

As time went on she began to make light of her destiny and to declare
that there was no horror in this house at all, but only a young woman
living with her two children, one of whom was not so attractive as the
other. It was true that sometimes, when she was sewing or washing dishes
at the sink, she would find herself standing quite still, her fingers
rigid, her mind shocked and vacant, as if some thought had strode into
it and showed so monstrous a face that all other thoughts had fled; and
she would realise that she had been thinking of something about Roger,
but she could not remember what. Usually this happened after there h