Rodney’s vigorously objective mind had always been so fully occupied with things as they were that it found little leisure for speculation on things as they might be.  The day’s work was always so vividly absorbing to him that day-dreams never got a chance.  His sex impulses had always been crowded down to the smallest possible compass, not because he was a Puritan, but because he was, spiritually and mentally, an athlete.  He had never thought of marriage as a serious possibility, Frederica’s efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, until, in a moment of bewilderment, he found himself head over ears in love with Rose Stanton.  That this emotion had been able to fight its way into the fortress of his life spoke volumes for the power and the vitality of it.  Once it got inside, it formed a part of the garrison of the fort.  And, just as the contemplation of marriage had had to wait until there was a Rose Stanton to make it concrete and irresistible, so the contemplation of fatherhood would have to wait for a concrete fact to drive it home.

With certain important differences, Rose was a good deal like him.  She had never had time to dream much.  The pretending games of childhood—­playing with dolls, playing house—­had never attracted her away from more vigorous and athletic enterprises.  A superb physique gave her an outlet for her emotional energy, so that she satisfied her wants pretty much as she became aware of them.  And, conversely, she remained unaware of possibilities she had not, as yet, the means to realize.

They were both rather abnormally normal about this.  Persons of robust emotions seldom think very much about them.  The temperament that cultivates its emotional soil assiduously, warms it, waters it and watches anxiously for the first sprouts, gets a rather anemic growth for its pains.  Which of these facts is cause and which effect, one need not pretend to say:  whether it is a lack of vitality in the seed that prompts the instinct of cultivation, or whether it is the cultivation that prevents a sturdy growth.  But, feeble as the results of cultivation may be, they produce at least the apparent advantage of running true to form.  The thing that sprouts in cultivated soil will be what was planted there—­will be, at all events, appropriate.

But in Rose’s penitential mood, and in the absence of a prepared background, it was the processes of her pregnancy rather than the issue of it, that got into the foreground of her mind.  She was in for an experience now that no one could call trivial.  She had months of misery ahead of her, she assumed, reasoning from the one she had just gone through with, surmounted by hours of agony and peril that even Portia wouldn’t deny the authenticity of.

Well, she was glad of it; glad she was going to be hurt.  She could get back some of her self-respect, she thought, by enduring it all, first the wretchedness, then the pain, with a Spartan fortitude.  There would he a sort of savage satisfaction in marching through all her miseries with her head up.