Mrs. Price began to speak tremulously for his comfort. "Those were circumstances we couldn't help, dear. Thank Heaven that this time, when you are really more seriously in need of us, we are here beside you to do everything in our power. I think Winnie ought to lie down and rest," Mrs. Price said, shepherding her husband out of the room before his exultance should become too crass. * * * * * Laurence came heavily into the house and hung up his hat. All day he had felt the new child, a fiery thread through the blackness of his mind sewing him to earth. His fear of the new child smoldered like a hot ache in the back of his brain. Thirty-one years old. He could not bear to recall in detail the incidents of his life. He had achieved nothing; so he had ceased to believe in achievement. As a boy he had invariably thought of himself in grandiose and ultra-masculine rôles. When girls had come into his dreams they had come in gratitude to receive some contemptuous beneficence at his hands. He was ashamed now when he recalled the gauche sense of superiority that had showed itself in bad manners. And yet his habit of mind remained the same. When he ceased to give himself he would admit equality, and he could not do that. His pride bound him to endless obligations. Against Winnie, he obliterated gladness in himself and denied his acquisitive spirit. She should have him all and he would be nothing. The door in the hall opened behind Laurence and closed with a sharp click of the latch. Laurence moved in the heaviness of circles, but Alice's movements were always angular and resistant. "Hello, Laurie," she said coldly. They seldom talked together. The gas flame burnt blue in the cold hall. Alice took off her beaver sailor hat and hung it beside Laurence's acid-stained derby. She looked at him. The patience she read in his coarse florid face was like everything else in the house. The house at night was a monstrous phlegmatic beast half drowned. Its inmates were sightless parasites. Alice was pugnacious. "What's the matter with you?" she joked brusquely. "Winnie hasn't had twins, has she?" "Winnie's all right," Laurence said. "How do you regard the prospect of becoming a proud father a third time, Laurence?" she demanded suddenly. She knew she was offensive but felt she must wrench something from this huge mass of bitterly desponding flesh. The world was muted with fleshiness and heaviness. Only in her own body pain rang clear and sharp and chiming sweet. Her pain was her beauty that she kept inside herself. It was her virginity. She felt that he had no beauty of pain. "You are the only thing that reconciles me to it, Alice," he retorted sourly. "A benighted old spinster, eh?" "Well, I have a pretty wife and shall soon have three lovely children. My state has its compensatory illusions." "Ah, yes, I suppose it has." She did not know what more to say to him. He walked into the living-room, ignoring her.