Mercenariness is not one of my faults, anyway. It is true that since I have ceased to earn anything, I do sometimes feel a wee pinch of scarcity, and wish that he could send me even a few shillings a week more. But if that was only all of my trouble! No, Mrs. S., may you live as long as Heaven wills. If I thought that in any part of me there lurked one little longing to hear of that good woman's death, I should never forgive myself. Still, I don't think it right of her to play the despot over Harry to the extent to which she carries it. A man thirty-eight years old has surely the right to marry, if he wishes to. If it hadn't been for her, my marriage could have been made public from the first, and all that woe at R. would have been spared. Harry says that she hates the very word "marriage," and that if she was to get the least scent of his marriage, she would cut him off with a shilling. He has run a risk, poor old Hal, for my sake, and if now and again he can't help longing to be rich and free, it is hard to blame him. The day he is rich and free there will be a spree, Gwen! It is wrong to anticipate it, but see if I don't make the street of R. glow, if not with the wine of France, at least with beer, and if I don't teach a certain staid Miss Violet Mordaunt how to do the high-kick, girls! I wonder if all will be over by then, and if I shall go back to dear old R. not only a wife but a mother? Then again, a month later: What a thing! to be a mother! Sometimes the thought hits me suddenly between the eyes, and I can't believe it is I myself--that same powerlessness to recognize myself which I had for fully a week after the marriage. But this is greater still, to have something which will be to me what I have been to my own mother. Gwen, Gwen, how exquisitely droll! How one grows into something else quite different, without at all noticing how and when! But will it never be over? It is like heaving a sigh a century long. Won't it be nice to dance again, and fling one's limbs? But meantime, such a weight of care, strange fears, gazings into I don't know what abyss, and never a day without its flood of tears. I want my mother. It is no good; I want to go back to where I was born. I am not strong enough to bear this. But after Tuesday's promise to him, what can I do? I have said now that I won't write until after, and I won't if God gives me strength. For two months there was no entry, and then came joy that a son was born; but from the time of that birth, the diary which had before been profuse and daily became short and broken.