When Alice ‘came downstairs’ again, butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Abner had never known her so studiously charming. From the first it was as if she smiled: ‘For goodness’ sake let us forget what has happened and make a new start!’ and he couldn’t very well refuse to meet her. At the same time he found it difficult to conceal his suspicions that she was getting at him in some covert, female way. The situation would have been easier to handle if Alice hadn’t been a trifle pale and interesting. She didn’t pick up very quickly, and now, of course, in addition to the ordinary housework she had to look after the baby, who was already suffering from its mother’s dietetic indiscretions. Like many thin young women Alice could never conquer her inclination for sweets and for vinegar, and as a consequence the child was noisy and irritable. Her housework went to the wall, and in despair she turned to Abner to help her out. Nothing could have been sweeter than her temper, and though he didn’t believe in it he couldn’t help being sorry for her, and did what she asked him. As a matter of fact, he was already a little interested in the baby. The smallness of its limbs and the timid uncertainty of its movements fascinated him. He regarded it with a certain benignant curiosity, much as he might have looked at a nestling taken from a hedge in April. Of course Alice was feeding her child at the breast. If Abner came into the kitchen in the middle of this performance she would turn round quickly and take the baby upstairs or out into the washhouse, blushing. Abner wondered why she did this. Other women weren’t so sensitive. Sometimes he would pass a couple of them standing at their garden gates gossiping and feeding their babies at the same time. He had never taken any notice of them. Nobody else took any notice of them. There was something in Alice’s blushes that embarrassed him unreasonably. Afterward he asked himself why this should be; but when next he saw Alice hiding her white breast he blushed himself. The new relation was very curious. If it hadn’t been for Abner’s profound distrust of her they might even have become intimate. It was no good for Alice to pretend that she wasn’t lonely. In spite of all her pride in being a married woman and the mother of a family’s beginning, she couldn’t conceal the fact that since the baby’s birth her husband took very little notice of her. It was as if he had said: ‘Now that I’ve done my duty by the nation and given you something to play with you can just attend to my comforts without bothering me.’ He had lately transferred his custom from the Greyhound to the Lyttleton Arms. A shorter walk at closing time. So far he had never maltreated Alice, but she knew very well that she couldn’t now play him the tricks that had pleased him in their courting days.