as with her a passion, and yet she had
to pretend to the world. She suffered acutely when with girls of her own
age, because she felt unfit to be with them. Often, with Georgie, who
had not half her fineness, she would feel she ought not to be sitting
talking to her or letting her come and stay in the same house. She
suffered sometimes from a morbid wish to tell the world what she really
was. And yet, as she told herself sometimes, if suffering can purge,
surely she was clean enough....

She had never breathed the word "marriage" to Killigrew, who had no
reason for knowing she was not as happy as himself in what was too
spontaneous and delightful even to be called an arrangement. It had been
a "success"; the life they had lived since Judy had let him know he
could take her as he wished. Killigrew would as soon have married as
have installed a woman as his mistress; the freedom of a _union libre_
held no illusions for him. Yet to do him justice it was even more that
he would have hated to have their relationship spoiled by anything so
hard-and-fast. They met as before, went for wonderful holidays together,
and if she knew he was "fitting her in," she was too wonderfully
poignantly happy when with him, too satisfied in every fibre of her
nature, to think of it; while afterwards, if she had allowed herself to
dwell on it--beyond the one or two days of acute suffering that would
follow upon every time--she would have died, in heart and mind, if not
in body, of the pain.

Sometimes, when she was either very happy with him or drowning in the
bitter aftermath, she would lie pretending to herself as a child does.
These imaginings always took the same form, and on this night at
Paradise she began the old childish-womanly game again when she saw
sleep would not come.

The pretence was that she was going to have a baby. In her heart of
hearts she knew she wanted Killigrew to marry her, or rather to want to
marry her. With all her knowledge of him she could not quite come to the
belief that she could not make him happy if he were married to her....
Perhaps if she were going to have a baby, he would want to. He would
not; but he would have done it as soon as he saw she really wanted it,
though without seeing the necessity, which would not have existed in a
world constructed on his plan. Still, she knew he would do it, given the
right circumstances; also she knew he had the deep love for children
derived from a Jewish strain in hi