“You didn’t think of that, did you, Mummy?  I thought of it,” said Nicky.

Once he ran away over the West Heath, and got into the Leg of Mutton Pond, and would have been drowned if a total stranger hadn’t gone in after him and pulled him out.  That time Nicky was sent to bed at four o’clock in the afternoon.  At seven, when his mother came to tuck him up and say Good-night, she found him sitting up, smiling and ready.

“Mummy,” he said, “I think I ought to tell you.  It isn’t a bit of good sending me to bed.”

“I should have thought it was, myself,” said Frances.  She almost suspected Nicky of insincerity.

“So it would have been,” he assented, “if I didn’t ’vent things.  You see, I just lie still ’venting things all the time.  I’ve ’vented three things since tea:  a thing to make Daddy’s bikesickle stand still with Daddy on it; a thing to squeeze corks out of bottles; and a thing to make my steam-engine go faster.  That isn’t a punishment, is it, Mummy?”

* * * * *

They said that Nicky would grow out of it.  But two more years passed and Nicky was still the same.

And yet he was not the same.  And Dorothy, and Michael and John were not the same.

For the awful thing about your children was that they were always dying.  Yes, dying.  The baby Nicky was dead.  The child Dorothy was dead and in her place was a strange big girl.  The child Michael was dead and in his place was a strange big boy.  And Frances mourned over the passing of each age.  You could no more bring back that unique loveliness of two years old, of five years old, of seven, than you could bring back the dead.  Even John-John was not a baby any more; he spoke another language and had other feelings; he had no particular affection for his mother’s knee.  Frances knew that all this dying was to give place to a more wonderful and a stronger life.  But it was not the same life; and she wanted to have all their lives about her, enduring, going on, at the same time.  She did not yet know that the mother of babies and the mother of boys and girls must die if the mother of men and women is to be born.

Thoughts came to Frances now that troubled her tranquillity.

Supposing, after all, the children shouldn’t grow up as she wanted them to?

There was Nicky.  She could do nothing with him; she could make no impression on him.

There was Michael.  She couldn’t make him out.  He loved them, and showed that he loved them; but it was by caresses, by beautiful words, by rare, extravagant acts of renunciation, inconsistent with his self-will; not by anything solid and continuous.  There was a softness in Michael that distressed and a hardness that perplexed her.  You could make an impression on Michael—­far too easily—­and the impression stayed.  You couldn’t obliterate it.  Michael’s memory was terrible.  And he had secret ways.  He was growing more and more sensitive, more and more wrapped up in Himself.  Supposing Michael became a morbid egoist, like Anthony’s brother, Bartholomew?