Shallow prattle seemed
presumptuous. He became impatient and irritated, she was wearied. And so
they lapsed into their solitude again. For they preferred it.
But now, in a few weeks' time, her second baby would be born. The first
had died, an infant, when her husband first went out to France. She
looked with joy and relief to the coming of the second. It would be her
salvation. But also she felt some anxiety. She was thirty years old, her
husband was a year younger. They both wanted the child very much. Yet she
could not help feeling afraid. She had her husband on her hands, a
terrible joy to her, and a terrifying burden. The child would occupy her
love and attention. And then, what of Maurice? What would he do? If only
she could feel that he, too, would be at peace and happy when the child
came! She did so want to luxuriate in a rich, physical satisfaction of
maternity. But the man, what would he do? How could she provide for him,
how avert those shattering black moods of his, which destroyed them both?
She sighed with fear. But at this time Bertie Reid wrote to Isabel. He
was her old friend, a second or third cousin, a Scotchman, as she was a
Scotchwoman. They had been brought up near to one another, and all her
life he had been her friend, like a brother, but better than her own
brothers. She loved him--though not in the marrying sense. There was a
sort of kinship between them, an affinity.
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