"Let's have it for lunch, and if you want to dictate, start quickly, before disinclination conquers me. I've never wanted to stay away from work before." He shook his smooth round head. "I've quite a lot of nieces and nephews, myself, but not one of them ever threw me off my balance--not one. Women----" "Well?" "Queer things! Now, please. To Mr. Thomas Cartright. Dear Sir." Grace's little daughter revealed the maternal in Theresa. Grace had the quality in its fairest shape, the one painters choose to picture, tender, soft and content. Her arms were intimate with the small body they held, her voice and her laughter had the mother note, and her smiling lips took on a new and passionate droop. Her eyes, adoring the baby, adored Phil the more, and he, through worship of his wife, worshipped the baby. Watching this ancient and eternal trinity, Theresa felt her eyes pricked with dreadful tears. She dropped her lids on them, and saw the inner wilderness in which she lived. It was shorn of beauty, it was a waste, empty but for the little figure of herself, moving on and on--to what? There seemed no bourne for her. She did not know what she wanted: she was not sure that Grace's happiness was one she envied; but she stooped and seized the baby and held it close, not with the perfection of Grace's instinct, but with a gaunt desire that savagely portrayed a universal hunger. She felt the common pangs, the common easing of them under the pressure of the little body, and while she held the child her restlessness was soothed and she was comforted. Against all likelihood she found a certain happiness in sharing the emotions known to other women. It joined her to them, so that she lost her stabbing consciousness of self, and she remembered how Alexander had said he liked to walk in the paths of other men, because it linked his humanity to theirs. She could consent to that, but only in this mood of soft desires that came too often for her pride. She suffered through that autumn. The nights brought happiness that only made the days more lonely, and she rushed to her work for refuge. She wrought at it with something near to genius and remained unsatisfied, so that she began to know a secret, faint despair of self that shook her into fear, and so into defiance and a determination not to fail. She drove herself back to the gallant thoughts of childhood: she remembered that it was wonderful to be alive, splendid to struggle, that she had looked to difficulties as her destiny, and here was her chance to combat them. She took the chance, and in those days, Neville, watching her, saw that she went with her head carried higher, and a new calm about her lips. He tried to draw her into talk, but she avoided it. She feared his quickness as she feared her father's love, and it was to Bessie she went when weariness came to mock at her bright courage, for Bessie was tonic in her simplicity and her readiness to do without the thing she could not have.