What is this thing, the soul?  It blows hot, it blows cold, it reels with the drunkenness of exaltation for some slight event no denser than a dream, it hoods itself with penitence for some act that the mind can hardly remember; and yet its judgments are the voice of absolute wisdom.  She did not care at all for Roger.  When at nights she used to see in the blackness the little figure standing in his shirt, beating the dark air with his fists, as Susan told her he used to do when Peacey woke him suddenly out of his sleep to frighten him, her pity, was flavourless and abstract.  That she had unwittingly sent the child to its doom caused her no earthquake of remorse but a storm of annoyance.  Yet she knew every hour of the day that her soul had taken a decision to mourn the child in some way that would hurt her.

One afternoon, a month or so after their happy, lonely Christmas, when she was playing balls in the garden with Richard, the postman came up and handed her another letter from Susan Rodney.  Though Peacey had forbidden her to write to Susan Rodney, so that she had never been able to explain why she did not come and fetch Roger, he allowed Susan to write to her.  Weekly Marion received letters cursing her cruelly in not coming, written in an honest writing that made them hurt the more.  She took it and smiled in the postman’s face.  “Well, how is Mrs. Brown getting on with the new baby?” When he had gone she gave it to Richard and told him to go and drop it in the kitchen fire.  While he was away she stood and stared down at the acid green of the winter grass, and wondered what she had missed by not reading the letter, what story of blows delivered cunningly here and there so that they did not mark, or of petting that skilfully led up to a sudden feint of terrifying temper; and suddenly she was conscious of a fret in the air, and said wonderingly, “It is far too early for the Spring.  We are hardly into February yet.”  But the fret had been not in the air but in herself, and the change of season it had foreboded had been in her own soul.

That very night she had begun to have bad dreams.  Twice before the dawn she was stoned down Roothing High Street, even as seven years before men looked at her from behind glazed, amused masks; and she had put up her hand to her head and found that a stone had drawn blood; and Mr. Goode’s kind voice said something about, “A bit of boys’ fun, Mr. Peacey,” and she had stared before her at a black, broadclothed bulk.  In the morning she woke sweating like an overdriven horse, and said to herself, “This is the worst night I have spent in all my life.  Pray God I may never spend another like it.”