But into Mrs. Fowler's face there had come the look with which she was accustomed to receive the suggestion that her dinner parties were an extravagance. That economy which she practised so rigidly, which was so elastic to cover little pleasures and the minor comforts of life, broke like a cobweb when she tried to stretch it over larger needs and desires. The severity of her self-denial was directed entirely against the trivial and the unessential. With regard to the indispensable materials for happiness, she seemed to feel that she possessed an unquestionable right to enjoy them at any cost; and she had reassured Gabriella with an optimism which appeared perfectly genuine. After talking to her the girl had felt that she might allow herself to be happy if only George would change back into his old way. Four months ago, at the beginning of her marriage, she had told herself that she needed only the daily intimacy of life to make her understand him. Now, after living with him, she felt that she was growing to understand him less every hour--that the relation which ought to have brought them spiritually closer, had ended by thrusting them to an incalculable distance from each other. Of the nervous reactions which he had suffered she knew nothing. All she saw clearly was that the widening breach between them would soon become impassable unless it could be filled by their new love for the child. The power to hold him must slip from her hands to the child's, and she was more than ready, she was even eager, to relinquish it. In the last few months her feeling for George had altered, and, though she was hardly conscious of the change in herself, her love for him had become less passionate and more maternal. The tenderness was there, but the yearning, the delight in his mere physical presence was gone. Like every other emotion that she had felt in the past, her love for her husband had become absorbed in the passion, the longing, the delight with which she enfolded the thought of her child. "I wonder if mother felt like this about me," she would say to herself, and the wonder was like a cord drawing her back to her mother and to her own babyhood. Then George would become strangely vague, strangely remote in her thoughts; and her mother would seem nearer to her than everything except the child under her heart.