She leaned her head against the ottoman and shivered, then she reached over for a shawl that lay on it, and wrapped herself up in it, but still she shivered. She stood up and was about to go back to her bed, but she turned sharply round with another shudder, “Bah! I can’t,” she said and throwing a fur rug on to a couch she lay down there and soon grew warm enough to continue her dreary meditations. “And so I, I, Gwen Strange, will soon be the mother of a child—and Humphrey its father!” She hid her face in the soft fur. “It is ghastly!” she cried, “it is degradation, feeling towards him as I do, and as I’ve always done! I am debased to think that any man should have the least part of a woman so terribly in his power, when she can’t, can’t, can’t,” she almost shrieked, “give him the best. What do girls know of the things they make lawful for themselves? If they did, if they were shown the nature of their sacrifice, then marriage would cease till it carried love, absolute love in its train. Was I mad, my God! was I mad, with all my boasts of sanity?—Nothing, nothing,” she moaned, “but perfect love makes marriage sacred, nothing, neither God’s law nor man’s, and now the climax has come here in the outward and visible sign of my shame—I have sinned, not only in the present and the past but in the future, I have hurt an innocent unborn creature, I have set a barrier between it and its mother. “And Humphrey! Now I must sit under those deep all-pervading eyes of his and feel myself ten thousand times his chattel. Now we have a common hope, a common interest, almost a common existence, now every touch of his, every look of his, will burn me and remind me of my shame. Talk of the shame of women who have children out of the pale of marriage, it’s nothing to the shame of those who have children and don’t love. Those others, they have the excuse of love, that’s natural, that purifies their shame; this, our life—the portion of quite half the well-to-do world—this is unnatural, no sin can beat it for cruel baseness!” She huddled into her rug and lay silent, wild mad thoughts whirling through her brain. Gradually she grew calmer and more reasonable. “At least I can do one thing,” she whispered. “I will do all I can to make up to my child for the harm I have done it ignorantly, I will take care of myself, I will do everything I can to bring a natural creature into the world, I will try to protect it from its heredity. I am glad I know, I will do all I can to right your wrong, poor child!” She waved her hands to and fro in a sort of dumb agony. “And I could not even kiss your father, I couldn’t even kiss him when we both thought we were facing death!” She suddenly laughed aloud, a low curious mocking laugh, and put her hands up to her head.