rn the child in
some way that would hurt her.

One afternoon, a month or so after their happy, lonely Christmas, when
she was playing balls in the garden with Richard, the postman came up
and handed her another letter from Susan Rodney. Though Peacey had
forbidden her to write to Susan Rodney, so that she had never been able
to explain why she did not come and fetch Roger, he allowed Susan to
write to her. Weekly Marion received letters cursing her cruelly in not
coming, written in an honest writing that made them hurt the more. She
took it and smiled in the postman's face. "Well, how is Mrs. Brown
getting on with the new baby?" When he had gone she gave it to Richard
and told him to go and drop it in the kitchen fire. While he was away
she stood and stared down at the acid green of the winter grass, and
wondered what she had missed by not reading the letter, what story of
blows delivered cunningly here and there so that they did not mark, or
of petting that skilfully led up to a sudden feint of terrifying temper;
and suddenly she was conscious of a fret in the air, and said
wonderingly, "It is far too early for the Spring. We are hardly into
February yet." But the fret had been not in the air but in herself, and
the change of season it had foreboded had been in her own soul.

That very night she had begun to have bad dreams. Twice before the dawn
she was stoned down Roothing High Street, even as seven years before men
looked at her from behind glazed, amused masks; and she had put up her
hand to her head and found that a stone had drawn blood; and Mr.
Goode's kind voice said something about, "A bit of boys' fun, Mr.
Peacey," and she had stared before her at a black, broadclothed bulk. In
the morning she woke sweating like an overdriven horse, and said to
herself, "This is the worst night I have spent in all my life. Pray God
I may never spend another like it."

But henceforward half her nights were to be like that. By day her soul
walked like a peacock on its green lawn, proudly, pompously,
struttingly, because she was the mother of this gorgeous son. There was
no moment of her waking life that he did not gild, for either he had not
long gone out and had turned at the gate to wave good-bye with a gesture
so dear that when she thought of it she dug her nails into her palms in
an agony of tenderness, or he was just coming back and she must get
something ready for him. Even after he had gone to school he built her a
bu