And when she went into the dark room and saw the round plain face of her cousin’s wife drawn out of its roundness and dark with sweat and the usual laughter gone from it and the gravity of pain set there instead, the mother’s own body felt full and heavy as though it were she who bore the child and not this other one. And when the child came and she caught him and wrapped him in a bit of cloth and when she was free to go back to the field, she could not go. No, she went back to her own house listlessly, and when the old woman cried, “What--is it time for food? But I do not feel my hunger yet!” and when the girl came running out of the house shading her eyes with her hand, and crying, “Is it time already to light the fire, mother?” the mother answered listlessly, “No, it is too early, but I am strangely weary today and I will rest a while,” and she went and laid herself upon the bed. But she could not rest, and soon she rose and took up the little boy and held him fiercely and she laid her bosom open and would have had him suckle. But the child was astonished at her fierceness, being unused to it, and he was not hungry yet and he was full of play, and so he struggled and straightened himself and pushed her breast away and would not have it. Then the mother felt a strange sullen anger rise in her and she cuffed him and set him hard upon the ground and he screamed and she muttered, “Ever you will suck when I will not, and now when I will then you are not hungry!” And she was pleased in the strangest way, half bitterly, because he lay and wept. But the old woman cried out to hear his roaring and the little girl ran to pick him up. Then the mother felt her softness come back in her and she would not let the girl have him, but she lifted him suddenly herself and smoothed the dust from him, and wiped his tearful face with her palm, and she blamed herself secretly with a sort of shame that she had made the child suffer for her own pain. But the child never loved her breast so well again from that hour, and so even that small comfort she had had was taken from her. VIII