within-it.  To her mind, which always went for the essentials and left the trappings alone, the actual legal compact would not have mattered either way.  That was what her instinct, which in her was as nicely balanced as reason, told her.  But there was a side of her, as was inevitable, which was the child of her period and upbringing, and that side had never been talked over by Killigrew’s philosophy, with the result that when she gave him everything she suffered in her conscience as well as in her heart.  She had suffered ever since.  Truth was with her a passion, and yet she had to pretend to the world.  She suffered acutely when with girls of her own age, because she felt unfit to be with them.  Often, with Georgie, who had not half her fineness, she would feel she ought not to be sitting talking to her or letting her come and stay in the same house.  She suffered sometimes from a morbid wish to tell the world what she really was.  And yet, as she told herself sometimes, if suffering can purge, surely she was clean enough....

She had never breathed the word “marriage” to Killigrew, who had no reason for knowing she was not as happy as himself in what was too spontaneous and delightful even to be called an arrangement.  It had been a “success”; the life they had lived since Judy had let him know he could take her as he wished.  Killigrew would as soon have married as have installed a woman as his mistress; the freedom of a union libre held no illusions for him.  Yet to do him justice it was even more that he would have hated to have their relationship spoiled by anything so hard-and-fast.  They met as before, went for wonderful holidays together, and if she knew he was “fitting her in,” she was too wonderfully poignantly happy when with him, too satisfied in every fibre of her nature, to think of it; while afterwards, if she had allowed herself to dwell on it—­beyond the one or two days of acute suffering that would follow upon every time—­she would have died, in heart and mind, if not in body, of the pain.

Sometimes, when she was either very happy with him or drowning in the bitter aftermath, she would lie pretending to herself as a child does.  These imaginings always took the same form, and on this night at Paradise she began the old childish-womanly game again when she saw sleep would not come.

The pretence was that she was going to have a baby.  In her heart of hearts she knew she wanted Killigrew to marry her, or rather to want to marry her.  With all her knowledge of him she could not quite come to the belief that she could not make him happy if he were married to her....  Perhaps if she were going to have a baby, he would want to.  He would not; but he would have done it as soon as he saw she really wanted it, though without seeing the necessity, which would not have existed in a world constructed on his plan.  Still, she knew he would do it, given the right circumstances; also she knew he had the deep love for children derived from a Jewish strain in his family.  With that baby he would come to a fuller love of her than ever before; its advent would surely give him what even she admitted he lacked.