“Oh, smart women!  I mean women.”

“A good definition, dee-ar.  Well, lots of poor women don’t concentrate on the child either.  They have far too much to do and worry about.  They are ‘seeing to’ things up till the very last moment.”

“Then we must rule them out.  Let’s say the good women who have the time.”

“I expect a great many of them do, if the husband lets them.”

“Ah!” said Dion rather sharply.

“There are a few husbands, you see, who get fidgety directly the pedestal on which number one thinks himself firmly established begins to shake.”

“Stupid fools!”

“Eminently human stupid fools.”

“Are they?”

“Don’t you think so?”

“Perhaps.  But then humanity’s contemptible.”

“Extra-humanity, or the attempt at it, can be dangerous.”

“What do you mean exactly by that, mater?”

“Only that we have to be as we are, and can never really be, can only seem to be, as we aren’t.”

“What a whipping I’m giving to myself just now!” was her thought, as she finished speaking.

“Oh—­yes, of course.  That’s true.  I think—­I think Rosamund’s concentrating on the child, in a sort of quiet, big way.”

“There’s something fine in that.  But her doings are often touched with fineness.”

“Yes, aren’t they?  She doesn’t seem at all afraid.”

“I don’t think she need be.  She has such splendid health.”

“But she may suffer very much.”

“Yes, but something will carry her gloriously through all that, I expect.”

“And you think it’s very natural, very usual, her—­her sort of living alone with the child before it is born?”

Mrs. Leith saw in her son’s eyes an unmistakably wistful look at this moment.  It was very hard for her not to take him in her arms just then, not to say, “My son, d’you suppose I don’t understand it all—­all?” But she never moved, her hands lay still in her lap, and she replied: 

“Very natural, quite natural, Dion.  Your Rosamund is just being herself.”

“You think she’s able to live with the child already?”

Mrs. Leith hesitated for a moment.  In that moment certainly she felt a strong, even an almost terrible inclination to tell a lie to her son.  But she answered: 

“Yes, I do.”

“That must be very strange,” was all that Dion said just then; but a little later on—­he stayed with his mother longer than usual that day because poor little Omar was dead—­he remarked: 

“D’you know, mater, I believe it’s the right thing to be what’s called a thorough-paced egoist at certain moments, in certain situations.”

“Perhaps it is,” said his mother incuriously.

“I fancy there’s a good deal of rot talked about egoism and that sort of thing.”

“There’s a good deal of rot talked about most things.”

“Yes, isn’t there?  And besides, how is one to know?  Very often what seems like egoism may not be egoism at all.  As I grow older I often feel how important it is to search out the real reasons for things.”