nderness. "What's the matter, Lyd?" Madeleine went on.
"Something's not going just right. Are you scared about this second
confinement? Is Paul being horrid about something? You just take my
advice, and if you want anything out of him, you fight for it. Nobody
gets anything in this world if they don't put up a fight for it."

Lydia began to say that there were some things which lost their value if
obtained by fighting, but suddenly she stopped her faltering words, drew
a long breath, and laid her head on the other's shoulder. More than
wifely loyalty kept her silent. All her lifelong experience of Madeleine
crystallized into a certainty of her limitations, and with this
certainty came the realization that Madeleine stood for all the circle
of people about her. Lydia had learned one lesson of life. She knew, she
now knew intensely, that there was no cry by which she could reach the
spiritual ear of the warm human beings so close to her in the body. She
knew there was no language in which she could make intelligible her
travail of soul. In the moment the two women sat thus, she renounced,
once for all, any hope of outside aid in her perplexities. They lay
between herself and Paul. She could hope to find expression and relief
for them only through that unique privilege of marriage, utter intimacy.

She kissed her husband's sister gently, comforted somewhat by the mere
fact of her presence. "You're good to bother about me, Maddely," she
said, using a pet name of their common childhood. "I guess I'm not
feeling very well these days. But that's to be expected."

"Well, I tell you what, I wouldn't be so patient about it as _you_ are!"
cried the other wife. "It's simply horrid to have all this a second
time, and Ariadne so little yet. It's _mean_ of Paul."

She continued voicing an indignant sympathy with her usual energy. Lydia
looked at her with a vague smile. At the first words of the childless
woman, she had been filled with the mother-hunger which gave savor to
her life during those days. As Madeleine went on, she sat unheeding,
lost in a fond impatience to feel the tiny body on her knees, the downy
head against her cheek. Her arms ached with emptiness. For an instant,
so vivid was her sense of it, the child seemed to be there, in her arms.
She felt the eager tug of the soft lips at her breast. She looked
down--"Well, anyhow, you poor, dear thing! I hope you will bottle-feed
this one! It would be just a little _too_ much