It was indeed not so much emotion as a sense that in other circumstances these things might have aroused an emotion which, with his comprehensive greed of all that was lovely in the universe, he regretted being without.  If he had only been with her now he would have been given that, and would have found, like her, that it is possible to be ardently in love with an unknown person.  She was so sorry he was not here.  But she knew that he would come soon, and then he would have the joy of seeing his true child, the child of his soul, and beyond the spiritual joy that must come of that relationship he would have the delight of the exquisite being she knew she was going to bring forth.  For she knew then perfectly what Richard was going to be like.  She knew she was going to have a son; she knew that he would have black, devout and sensitive eyes.  She knew that he would be passionate and intractable and yet held to nobility by fastidiousness and love of her.  She imagined how some day in a wood like this, but set in a kinder countryside, Harry would kneel in a sunlit clearing, his special quality of gaiety playing about him like another kind of sunshine, while there staggered towards him their beautiful dark child.  He would miss nothing then, except this time of acquaintance with the unborn, and perhaps he would not even miss that, for no doubt he would make her the mother of other children.

At that thought she stood still and leaned back against the trunk of a tree and closed her eyes and smiled triumphantly, and ran her hands down her body, planning that it should perform this miracle again and again and people her world with lovely, glowing, disobedient sons and daughters.  She felt her womb as an inexhaustible treasure.  Slowly, swimmingly, in a golden drowse of exultation, she moved on among the trees till she came to the wood’s end, and looked across the waste patch scattered with knots of bramble and gorse at the yellow brick backs of the houses in Roothing High Street and knew she must go no further.  For the feeling against her was very high in the village.  They had told the most foul stories of her; it was as if they had been waiting anxiously for an excuse to talk of sexual things that they might let loose the unclean fantasies that they had kept tied up in the stables of their mind, that these might meet in the streets and breed, and take home litters filthier than themselves.  Men and women told tales that they could not have believed simply that they might evoke before their minds, and strengthened by the vital force of the listeners’ hot-eared excitement, pictures of a strong man and a fine girl living like beasts in the fields.  Not only did they tell lies of how they had watched her and Harry among the bracken, they said she had been seduced by the young doctor who had been locum tenens here in February, and that they had seen her in the lanes with the two lads that were being tutored at the Vicarage.  These things had been repeated to her by her grandmother