She reddened then and held her breath.  Queer, how she had blurted it out!  She had not meant to tell any one yet.  But the look of dawning joy and relief in Martha’s eyes made her glad she had spoken.  Plainly the nurse had been dreading the time so fast approaching when she would have to leave Susette, who was now nearly four years old.  But all she said to Ethel was this: 

“I’m glad to hear it, Mrs. Lanier.  I hope you’ll be very careful now.”  She shot a look as keen as a knife, which asked, “Do you really want a child?  Or are you like her?  Was it a mistake?”

And Ethel went quickly out of the room.  In the living-room her eye was caught by Amy’s photograph on the table.  She had always kept it there.  In her cleaning she had put it back.  Emily, too, had put it back.  They had never spoken Amy’s name.  But Ethel faced the picture now for some moments steadily.  Somehow it had lost its beauty, it looked weak and soul-less, without power any longer over Ethel’s future.  “Poor Amy.  Oh, how much you missed.”  And she added, “I’ll never be like that.”  For an instant she let her mind dwell on the past, on how Susette’s coming must have been—­unwelcomed by her mother.

“But this one will be welcomed!  Our love is so—­so different!  This will bind us, oh, so close!  It’s done now, you’re tied for life!” She had never felt it so before.  The months of her marriage had been so exciting, and even in the long summer’s thinking her love had seemed always a little unreal.  “But this is real—­inside of me!” Her fancy went careering ahead, with joy and wonder, a thrill of dismay.  “I was so free, with my life to choose!  I could have been almost anything!  But now it is settled.  This is my life.  We talk and we talk about being free—­and then all at once—­a baby.”

In the days which followed and grew into weeks and months, the feeling of quiet remained with her.  The pang of uneasiness as to how she was to find friends for Joe and herself, was allayed and put off to the future.  He would not expect anything of her just now.  And because it was pressing upon her no longer, it became a pleasure to dream and plan for herself and Joe and the children.

She was only twenty-four, and although Joe was thirty-six he looked years younger.  They could grow.  Now she began asking him to read aloud in the evenings, nor was the reading all “mere fluff.”  Though she picked out amusing things to vary the monotony, she insisted on magazines and books which had been recommended by the little history “prof” at home, to whom Ethel wrote long letters.  The books rather appalled her husband at times; but using her new hold on him, she said: 

“Go on, dear, now begin.”  And she picked up her sewing with a look which said, “We’ve got to grow, you know, if we’re ever to get friends worth while or have a life worth living.”

But again she would shut out all that, and smile to herself and grow absorbed.  And this habit grew to such a degree that by the beginning of summer their reading bees had come to an end.  In June she took Martha and Susette and went to the seashore for three months.  She came back in September, and now the time was drawing near.  Her husband’s love grew anxious and there came troubled gleams in his eyes.