In the hospital, the imaginative process continued with increasing force.  He looked at his wife with new eyes.  Formerly she had been to him a mere bundle of negations, a labyrinth of dead walls and bolted doors.  There was nothing behind the walls, and the doors led no-whither:  he had sounded and listened often enough to be sure of that.  Now he felt like a traveller who, exploring some ancient ruin, comes on an inner cell, intact amid the general dilapidation, and painted with images which reveal the forgotten uses of the building.

His wife stood by a white crib in one of the wards.  In the crib lay a child, a year old, the nurse affirmed, but to Lethbury’s eye a mere dateless fragment of humanity projected against a background of conjecture.  Over this anonymous particle of life Mrs. Lethbury leaned, such ecstasy reflected in her face as strikes up, in Correggio’s Night-piece, from the child’s body to the mother’s countenance. it was a light that irradiated and dazzled her.  She looked up at an inquiry of Lethbury’s, but as their glances met he perceived that she no longer saw him, that he had become as invisible to her as she had long been to him.  He had to transfer his question to the nurse.

“What is the child’s name?” he asked.

“We call her Jane,” said the nurse.

III

Lethbury, at first, had resisted the idea of a legal adoption; but when he found that his wife’s curiously limited imagination prevented her regarding the child as hers till it had been made so by process of law, he promptly withdrew his objection.  On one point only he remained inflexible; and that was the changing of the waif’s name.  Mrs. Lethbury, almost at once, had expressed a wish to rechristen it:  she fluctuated between Muriel and Gladys, deferring the moment of decision like a lady wavering between two bonnets.  But Lethbury was unyielding.  In the general surrender of his prejudices this one alone held out.

“But Jane is so dreadful,” Mrs. Lethbury protested.

“Well, we don’t know that she won’t be dreadful.  She may grow up a Jane.”

His wife exclaimed reproachfully.  “The nurse says she’s the loveliest—­”

“Don’t they always say that?” asked Lethbury patiently.  He was prepared to be inexhaustibly patient now that he had reached a firm foothold of opposition.

“It’s cruel to call her Jane,” Mrs. Lethbury pleaded.

“It’s ridiculous to call her Muriel.”

“The nurse is sure she must be a lady’s child.”

Lethbury winced:  he had tried, all along, to keep his mind off the question of antecedents.

“Well, let her prove it,” he said, with a rising sense of exasperation.  He wondered how he could ever have allowed himself to be drawn into such a ridiculous business; for the first time he felt the full irony of it.  He had visions of coming home in the afternoon to a house smelling of linseed and paregoric, and of being greeted by a chronic howl as he went up stairs to dress for dinner.  He had never been a club-man, but he saw himself becoming one now.