In the hospital, the imaginative process continued with increasing
force. He looked at his wife with new eyes. Formerly she had been to
him a mere bundle of negations, a labyrinth of dead walls and bolted
doors. There was nothing behind the walls, and the doors led
no-whither: he had sounded and listened often enough to be sure of
that. Now he felt like a traveller who, exploring some ancient ruin,
comes on an inner cell, intact amid the general dilapidation, and
painted with images which reveal the forgotten uses of the building.
His wife stood by a white crib in one of the wards. In the crib lay
a child, a year old, the nurse affirmed, but to Lethbury's eye a
mere dateless fragment of humanity projected against a background of
conjecture. Over this anonymous particle of life Mrs. Lethbury
leaned, such ecstasy reflected in her face as strikes up, in
Correggio's Night-piece, from the child's body to the mother's
countenance. it was a light that irradiated and dazzled her. She
looked up at an inquiry of Lethbury's, but as their glances met he
perceived that she no longer saw him, that he had become as
invisible to her as she had long been to him. He had to transfer his
question to the nurse.
"What is the child's name?" he asked.
"We call her Jane," said the nurse.
III
Lethbury, at first, had resisted the idea of a legal adoption; but
when he found that his wife's curiously limited imagination
prevented her regarding the child as hers till it had been made so
by process of law, he promptly withdrew his objection.
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