In this particular Gwen Strange could score over the whole sad brood, her grief was aloof, alone, it differed in every point from the kindly race of men, it had no balm and less outlet, she could not cry nor strive, she could not throw her whole soul against fate and fall back with the pain dulled from sheer tiredness. Every day with the little white mother lying cold on her bed, she still walked in the sun on the south terrace, and cherished her child, but virtue had gone out of her. “She will kill me,” Mrs. Fellowes told her husband, “if she looks like that long! she’s not tragic, not an atom, nor dramatic; I think she must look like Dante did when he stood before the gates of Saint Ilario.” “Yes, one hardly dares think of the girl, walking, and eating, and sleeping; and she looks younger than ever I saw her. What is _he_ doing now? I must go up soon.” “Sitting holding her hand, except when he is told to come to his meals. Of course, knowing the man, one could describe his grief to a T. It’s just himself.” “What will time do for the two, I wonder?” “There is something gone from Gwen that no time will give back to her: I wish, oh, I wish I knew how it was at the end. Did that woman go down into the grave still seeking her lost motherhood? Oh, John, John, God in Heaven help women! I wonder if He knew quite everything when He made us, He is all masculine. I don’t think He altogether did or He would have stayed His hand and have had mercy.” “My little Ruth, my poor little wife, life even for us is hard!” “But it is simpler, it is the complications which put barbs on our arrows, the vague yearnings quivering in us ignorantly, not with the knowledgeable, healthy hammer-strokes of men’s anguish; and our bodies are nearer our souls. Think of Gwen with her unborn child under that heartful of unnameable pain! John, it’s only three o’clock—will you drive me into the town, the market is full on—I must see some women who are too stolid for nerves—oh—the letters, and one from Humphrey! John, he’s down with fever, and Brydon’s only half way through! “‘Not a man-jack of the blacks—being mostly christianized—is worth his salt, only for Tolly we’d cave in altogether, the fellow’s a brick, and seems like developing the beginnings of an intellect, just in the nick of time too; never in all my life was I so knocked into a cocked hat as by this fever.’ “Look at the writing, John, it’s shocking.