d out into his passion for her. She had always known
these things, and now the knowledge of them was not balanced by the
knowledge that her faith held weight for weight of infamy and glory. For
now that Roger was not here there was nothing to remind her that the man
to whom she had given her virginity had not come to her help when she
was going to have his child and had left her to be trodden into the mud
by the fat man Peacey. Now she only knew that she was the beloved mother
of this splendid son. What had happened to the man with whom, according
to the indecent and ridiculous dispensation of nature, she had had to be
enmeshed in a net of hot excitements and undignified physical impulses
in order to obtain this child, mattered nothing at all. He had been so
much less splendid than his son.

She grew well with happiness. She became plumper, and there was colour
on her cheeks as well as in her lips. People ceased to treat her with
the hostility that the happy feel for the unhappy. Presently she knew
that she would soon regain complete self-control and would be able to
keep shut the trap-door of her hidden self, and that it would be quite
safe for her to have Roger back at the end of three months. She began to
speak of it to Richard. "Roger will be with us for Xmas," she used to
say. "We must think out some surprises for him...." To which Richard
would answer tensely, "I s'pose so." That always chilled her, and she
would drop the subject, feeling that after all there was no need to
speak of it just yet. But once, as the days passed into December, she
tried to have it out with him, and followed it up by saying: "You might
try to be a little more pleased about it. I do want you and Roger to be
nice to each other." He answered, looking curiously grown up, "Oh, Roger
will always be nice to me--you needn't worry about that."

As she heard the tone, with its insolent allusion to Roger's natural
slavishness, she realised why the vicar and the teachers in the village
school, and many of the other people with whom he came in contact,
disliked him. There was something terrifying about this cold-tempered
judgment coming from a child. She had wondered, looking at the beauty of
his contemptuous little face and at the extraordinary skill with which
his small brown hands were whittling a block of wood into a figure,
whether it was not a sound instinct on the part of the race to persecute
illegitimate children. Either they were conceived