burden of her love:  then her mind and soul could go on in his company without vexing him with these demands that only the unborn or the nursling could satisfy.  Then this second child would become separate from her, and she must conceive again and again until this intense life of the body failed in her and her flesh ceased to be a powerful artist exulting in the creation of masterpieces.  It must be so.  For Richard’s sake it must be so.  Her love would be too heavy a cloak for one child, for it was meant to be a tent under which many should dwell.  Again as in the wood she laid her hand on her body and felt it as an inexhaustible treasure.  Again she was instantly mocked.

There had come, then, a knock at the door.  She had felt a little frightened, for since her stoning in Roothing High Street she had felt fear at any contact with the external world; she knew now that rabies is endemic in human society, and that one can never tell when one may not be bitten by a frothing mouth.  But it was not late, and it was as likely as not that this was Cousin Tom Stallybrass come to say how the Frisian calf had sold at Prittlebay market, so she opened it at once.

Peacey stood there.  He stood quite still, his face held obliquely, his body stiff and jointless in his clothes, like a huge, fat doll.  There was an appearance of ceremony about him.  His skin shone with the white lacquer of a recent washing with coarse soap, he was dressed very neatly in his Sunday broadcloth, and he wore a black-and-white check tie which she had never seen him wear before, and his fingers looked like varnished bulging pods in tight black kid gloves.

He did not speak.  He did not answer her reluctant invitation that he should enter.  She would have thought him drunk had not the smell that clung about him been so definitely that of soap.  From the garden behind him, which was quilted by a thick night fog, noises as of roosting birds disturbed.  His head turned on the thick hill of his neck, his lids, with their fringe of long but sparse black lashes, blinked once or twice.  When the sound had passed, his face again grew blank and moonish and he stepped within.  He laid his bowler hat on the table and began to strip off his gloves.  His fleshy fingers, pink with constriction, terrified her, and she clapped her hands at him and cried out:  “Why have you come?”

But he answered nothing.  Speech is human, and words might have fomented some human relationship between them, and he desired that they should know each other only as animals and enemies.  He continued to take off his gloves, while round him fragments of fog that had come in with him hung in the warm air like his familiar spirits, and then bent over the lamp.  She watched his face grow yellow in the diminishing glare, and moaned, knowing herself weak with motherhood.  Then in the blackness his weight threshed down on her.  Even his form was a deceit, for his vast bulk was not obesity but iron-hard strength.