ight its way into the
fortress of his life spoke volumes for the power and the vitality of it.
Once it got inside, it formed a part of the garrison of the fort. And,
just as the contemplation of marriage had had to wait until there was a
Rose Stanton to make it concrete and irresistible, so the contemplation
of fatherhood would have to wait for a concrete fact to drive it home.

With certain important differences, Rose was a good deal like him. She
had never had time to dream much. The pretending games of
childhood--playing with dolls, playing house--had never attracted her
away from more vigorous and athletic enterprises. A superb physique gave
her an outlet for her emotional energy, so that she satisfied her wants
pretty much as she became aware of them. And, conversely, she remained
unaware of possibilities she had not, as yet, the means to realize.

They were both rather abnormally normal about this. Persons of robust
emotions seldom think very much about them. The temperament that
cultivates its emotional soil assiduously, warms it, waters it and
watches anxiously for the first sprouts, gets a rather anemic growth for
its pains. Which of these facts is cause and which effect, one need not
pretend to say: whether it is a lack of vitality in the seed that
prompts the instinct of cultivation, or whether it is the cultivation
that prevents a sturdy growth. But, feeble as the results of cultivation
may be, they produce at least the apparent advantage of running true to
form. The thing that sprouts in cultivated soil will be what was planted
there--will be, at all events, appropriate.

But in Rose's penitential mood, and in the absence of a prepared
background, it was the processes of her pregnancy rather than the issue
of it, that got into the foreground of her mind. She was in for an
experience now that no one could call trivial. She had months of misery
ahead of her, she assumed, reasoning from the one she had just gone
through with, surmounted by hours of agony and peril that even Portia
wouldn't deny the authenticity of.

Well, she was glad of it; glad she was going to be hurt. She could get
back some of her self-respect, she thought, by enduring it all, first
the wretchedness, then the pain, with a Spartan fortitude. There would
he a sort of savage satisfaction in marching through all her miseries
with her head up.

She couldn't do that if Rodney knew. He wouldn't let her. He'd want to
care for her, comfort he