er, as the days
passed by. She showed no sign of nervousness, had evidently no dread at
all of bodily pain. Either she trusted in her splendid health, or she
was so wrapped up in the thought of the joy of being a mother that
the darkness to be passed through did not trouble her; or perhaps--he
wondered about this--she was all the time schooling herself, looking up,
in memory, to the columns of the Parthenon. He was much more strung up,
much more restless and excitable than she was, but she did not seem to
notice it. Always singularly unconscious of herself she seemed at this
period to be also unobservant of those about her. He felt that she was
being deliberately egoistic for a great reason, that she was caring for
herself, soul and body, with a sort of deep and quiet intensity because
of the child.

"She is right," he said to himself, and he strove in all ways in his
power to aid her beautiful selfishness; nevertheless sometimes he felt
shut out; sometimes he felt as if already the unseen was playing truant
over the seen. He was conscious of the child's presence in the little
house through Rosamund's way of being before he saw the child. He
wondered what other women were like in such periods, whether Rosamund
was instinctively conforming to an ancient tradition of her sex, or
whether she was, as usual, strongly individualistic. In many ways she
was surely not like other women, but perhaps in these wholly natural
crises every woman resembled all her sisters who were traveling towards
the same sacred condition. He longed to satisfy himself whether this was
so or not, and one Saturday afternoon, when Rosamund was resting in her
little sitting-room with a book, and the Hermes watching over her, he
bicycled to Jenkins's gymnasium in the Harrow Road, resolved to put in
forty minutes' hard work, and then to visit his mother. Mrs. Leith and
Rosamund seemed to be excellent friends, but Dion never discussed his
wife with his mother. There was no reason why he should do so. On this
day, however, instinctively he turned to his mother; he thought that she
might help him towards a clearer knowledge of Rosamund.

Rosamund had long ago been formally made known to Bob Jenkins, Jim's
boxing "coach," who enthusiastically approved of her, though he had
never ventured to put his opinion quite in that form to Dion. Even
Jenkins, perhaps, had his subtleties, those which a really good heart
cannot rid itself of. Rosamund, in return, had made