She no longer represented the
negative side of his life; she showed, indeed, a tendency to
inconvenient affirmations. She had gradually expanded her assumption
of motherhood till it included his own share in the relation, and he
suddenly found himself regarded as the father of Jane. This was a
contingency he had not foreseen, and it took all his philosophy to
accept it; but there were moments of compensation. For Mrs. Lethbury
was undoubtedly happy for the first time in years; and the thought
that he had tardily contributed to this end reconciled him to the
irony of the means.
At first he was inclined to reproach himself for still viewing the
situation from the outside, for remaining a spectator instead of a
participant. He had been allured, for a moment, by the vision of
severed hands meeting over a cradle, as the whole body of domestic
fiction bears witness to their doing; and the fact that no such
conjunction took place he could explain only on the ground that it
was a borrowed cradle. He did not dislike the little girl. She still
remained to him a hypothetical presence, a query rather than a fact;
but her nearness was not unpleasant, and there were moments when her
tentative utterances, her groping steps, seemed to loosen the dry
accretions enveloping his inner self. But even at such
moments--moments which he invited and caressed--she did not bring
him nearer to his wife. He now perceived that he had made a certain
place in his life for Mrs.
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