She watched the girl walk off towards the towers and said to herself, “She is glad to go, half because she wants to see the view, and half because she wants to get away from me.  I was a fool to frighten her by losing my temper with Mrs. Winter.  But the blasphemy, the silly blasphemy of coming from a woman who has just lost her baby and talking of the kindness of God!...”  The tears she had held back since they had parted with the vicar’s wife ran down her cheeks.  It must, she thought, be the worst thing in the world to lose an only child.  Surely there could be nothing worse in all the range of human experience than having to let them take away the thing that belongs to one’s arms and put it in a coffin.  There would be a pain of the body as unparalleled, as unlike any other physical feeling, as the pains of birth, and there would be tormenting fundamental miseries that would eat at the root of peace.  A woman whose only child has died has failed for the time being in that work of giving life which is her only justification for existence, and so her unconscious mind would try to pretend that it had not happened and she would find herself unable to believe that the baby was really dead, and she would feel as if she had let them bury it alive.  All this Marion knew, because for one instant she had tried to imagine what it would have been like if Richard had died when he was little, and now this knowledge made her feel ashamed because she was the mother of a living and unsurpassable son and there existed so close at hand a woman who was having to spend the day in a house in one room of which lay a baby’s coffin.

And it was such a horrid house too.  Sorrow there would take a sickly and undignified form.  For the Coltsfoot bungalow was unusually ugly even for an Essex small-holding.  A broken balustrade round the verandah, heavy wooden gables, and an ingeniously large amount of inferior stained timbering gave it an air of having been built in order to find a last fraudulent use for a suite of furniture that had been worn out by a long succession of purchasers who failed to complete agreement under the hire system.  There were Nottingham lace curtains in the windows, the gate was never latched and swung on its hinges, nagging the paint off the gate-post, at each gust of wind.  If one passed in the rain there was always some tool lying out in the wet.  Ugliness was the order of the day there, and it was impossible to believe that the owners were anything but weak-eyed, plain people.

The baby had not really been pretty at all.  Mrs. Winter’s tribute to it had only been the automatic response to all aspects of child life which is cultivated by the wives of the clergy.  And the parents would take the tragedy ungracefully.  The woman would look out from her kitchen window at her husband as he pottered ineffectively with the goat and the fowls and all the gloomy fauna of the small-holding, which had, as one would not have thought that animals could