Ellen said in a little voice, “That was very brave of you,” and soared into an amazed exaltation from which she dipped suddenly to some practical consideration that she must settle at once.  Her eyes hovered about Marion’s and met them shyly, and she stammered softly, “Does having a baby hurt very much?” She did not feel at all disturbed when Marion answered, “Yes,” though that was the word she had been dreading, for the speech she added, “If the child is going to be worth while it always hurts, but one does not care,” seemed to her one of those sombre and heartening things like “King Lear,” or the black line of the Pentland Hills against the sky, which she felt took fear from life, since they showed it black and barren of comfort and yet more than ever beautiful.  It settled her practical consideration:  she had known that she would have to have children, because all married people did, but now she would look forward to it without cowardice and without regret.  Now she could soar again to her amazed exaltation and contemplate the woman who had given her Richard.

Even yet she was not clear concerning the processes of birth.  But in her mind’s eye she saw Marion lying on a narrow bed, her body clenched under the blankets; and her face pale and concave at cheek and temple with sickness and persecuted resolution, holding at bay with her will a crowd of doctors pressing round her with scalpels in their hands, preserving by her tensity the miracle of life that was to be Richard.  If she had relaxed, the world would not have been habitable, existence would have rolled through few and inferior phases.  When she stood at the windows of Grand-Aunt’s house on Liberton Brae every evening after mother’s death she would have seen nothing but dark glass patterned with uncheering suns of reflecting gaslight, and beyond a white roadway climbed by anonymous travellers.  She would have wept:  not waited, as she did, for the sound of the motorcycle that was driven with the dearest recklessness and would bring joy with it.  She would never have had occasion to run to the door and open it impetuously to life.  Her sensibility would have strayed on the dreary level of controlled grief.  It would not have sank under her, deliciously and dangerously, leaving her to stand quite paralysed while he flung off his cap and coat and gauntlets with those indolent, violent gestures, and whispered to her till his arms were free and he could stop her heart for a second with his long first kiss.

She would have sat all evening in the front parlour with Grand-Aunt and Miss McGinnis and helped with their sewing for the St. Giles’s bazaar, instead of appearing among them for five minutes to let them have a look at her great splendid man, who had to bend to come in at the doorway and give Miss McGinnis an opportunity to cry, “Dear me, Mr. Yaverland, you mind me so extraordinary of my own cousin Hendry who was drowned at Prestonpans.  He was just your height and he had the verra look of you,” and