“And that’s why it can’t satisfy me.—­Because it doesn’t, Roddy.  It hasn’t for ever so long.  It’s something wonderful that’s—­happened to me.  It’s the loveliest thing that ever happened to anybody.  And just because it’s so wonderful and beautiful, I can’t bear to—­well, this is hard to say—­I can’t bear to use it to live on.  I can’t bear to have it mixed up in things like millinery bills and housekeeping expense.  I can’t bear to see it become a thing that piles a load of hateful obligations on your back.  I could live on your friendship, Roddy; because your friendship would mean that somehow I was earning my way, but I can’t live on your love; any more than you could on mine.  Won’t you—­won’t you just try to think for a moment what that would mean to you?”

Now that he had sensed the direction her talk was headed in, even though he hadn’t even vaguely glimpsed the point at which she was going to bring up, he made it much harder for her to talk to him.  He was tramping up and down the room, stopping and turning short every now and then with a gesture of exasperation, or an interruption that never got beyond two or three words and broke off always in a sort of frantic speechlessness.

She knew he couldn’t help it.  Down underneath his mind, controlling utterly its processes, was a ganglion of instincts that were utterly outraged by the things she was saying to him.  It was they and not his intelligence she had to fight.  She must be patient, as gentle as she could, but she must make him listen.

“You’ve got my friendship!” he cried out now.  “It’s a grotesque perversion of the facts to say you haven’t.”

She smiled at him as she shook her head.  “I’ve spent too many months trying to get it and seeing myself fail—­oh, so ridiculously!—­not to know what I am talking about, Roddy.”

And then, still smiling, rather sadly, she told what some of the experiments had been—­some of her attempts to break into the life he kept locked away from her and carry off a share of it for herself.

“I was angry at first when I found you keeping me out,” she said, “angry and hurt.  I used to cry about it.  And then I saw it wasn’t your fault.  That’s how I discovered friendship had to be earned.”

But her power to maintain that attitude of grave detachment was about spent.  The passion mounted in her voice and in her eyes as she went on.

“You thought it was because of my condition, as you called it, that my mind had got full of wild ideas;—­the wild idea that I wasn’t really and truly your wife at all, but only your mistress, and that I was pulling you down from something free and fine that you had been, to something that you despised yourself for being and had to try to deny you were.  Those were the obsessions of a pregnant woman, you thought—­something she was to be soothed and coddled into forgetting.  You were wrong about that, Roddy.

“I did have an obsession, but it wasn’t the thing you thought.  It was an obsession that kept me quiet, and contented and happy, and willing to wait in spite of everything.  The obsession was that none of those things mattered because a big miracle was coming that was going to change it all.  I was going to have a job at last—­a job that was just as real as yours—­the job of being a mother.”