Ah!  Some one put the twisted end of a towel into her hand again—­ she had loosed it; and she pulled, pulled, enough to break cables.  And then she shrieked.  It was for pity.  It was for some one to help her, at any rate to take notice of her.  She was dying.  Her soul was leaving her.  And she was alone, panic-stricken, in the midst of a cataclysm a thousand times surpassing all that she had imagined of sickening horror.  “I cannot endure this,” she thought passionately.  “It is impossible that I should be asked to endure this!” And then she wept; beaten, terrorized, smashed and riven.  No commonsense now!  No wise calmness now!  No self-respect now!  Why, not even a woman now!  Nothing but a kind of animalized victim!  And then the supreme endless spasm, during which she gave up the ghost and bade good-bye to her very self.

She was lying quite comfortable in the soft bed; idle, silly:  happiness forming like a thin crust over the lava of her anguish and her fright.  And by her side was the soul that had fought its way out of her, ruthlessly; the secret disturber revealed to the light of morning.  Curious to look at!  Not like any baby that she had ever seen; red, creased, brutish!  But—­for some reason that she did not examine—­she folded it in an immense tenderness.

Sam was by the bed, away from her eyes.  She was so comfortable and silly that she could not move her head nor even ask him to come round to her eyes.  She had to wait till he came.

In the afternoon the doctor returned, and astounded her by saying that hers had been an ideal confinement.  She was too weary to rebuke him for a senseless, blind, callous old man.  But she knew what she knew.  “No one will ever guess,” she thought, “no one ever can guess, what I’ve been through!  Talk as you like.  I know, now.”

Gradually she had resumed cognizance of her household, perceiving that it was demoralized from top to bottom, and that when the time came to begin upon it she would not be able to settle where to begin, even supposing that the baby were not there to monopolize her attention.  The task appalled her.  Then she wanted to get up.  Then she got up.  What a blow to self-confidence!  She went back to bed like a little scared rabbit to its hole, glad, glad to be on the soft pillows again.  She said:  “Yet the time must come when I shall be downstairs, and walking about and meeting people, and cooking and superintending the millinery.”  Well, it did come—­ except that she had to renounce the millinery to Miss Insull—­but it was not the same.  No, different!  The baby pushed everything else on to another plane.  He was a terrific intruder; not one minute of her old daily life was left; he made no compromise whatever.  If she turned away her gaze from him he might pop off into eternity and leave her.

And now she was calmly and sensibly giving him suck in presence of Miss Insull.  She was used to his importance, to the fragility of his organism, to waking twice every night, to being fat.  She was strong again.  The convulsive twitching that for six months had worried her repose, had quite disappeared.  The state of being a mother was normal, and the baby was so normal that she could not conceive the house without him.