But it was a very dumb, weak, helpless self, a crawling
nursling. He went about very quiet, and in a way, submissive. He
had an unalterable self at last, free, separate,
independent.
She was relieved, she was free of him. She had given him to
himself. She wept sometimes with tiredness and helplessness. But
he was a husband. And she seemed, in the child that was coming,
to forget. It seemed to make her warm and drowsy. She lapsed
into a long muse, indistinct, warm, vague, unwilling to be taken
out of her vagueness. And she rested on him also.
Sometimes she came to him with a strange light in her eyes,
poignant, pathetic, as if she were asking for something. He
looked and he could not understand. She was so beautiful, so
visionary, the rays seemed to go out of his breast to her, like
a shining. He was there for her, all for her. And she would hold
his breast, and kiss it, and kiss it, kneeling beside him, she
who was waiting for the hour of her delivery. And he would lie
looking down at his breast, till it seemed that his breast was
not himself, that he had left it lying there. Yet it was himself
also, and beautiful and bright with her kisses. He was glad with
a strange, radiant pain. Whilst she kneeled beside him, and
kissed his breast with a slow, rapt, half-devotional
movement.
He knew she wanted something, his heart yearned to give it
her. His heart yearned over her. And as she lifted her face,
that was radiant and rosy as a little cloud, his heart still
yearned over her, and, now from the distance, adored her. She
had a flower-like presence which he adored as he stood far off,
a stranger.
The weeks passed on, the time drew near, they were very
gentle, and delicately happy. The insistent, passionate, dark
soul, the powerful unsatisfaction in him seemed stilled and
tamed, the lion lay down with the lamb in him.
She loved him very much indeed, and he waited near her. She
was a precious, remote thing to him at this time, as she waited
for her child. Her soul was glad with an ecstasy because of the
coming infant. She wanted a boy: oh, very much she wanted a
boy.
But she seemed so young and so frail. She was indeed only a
girl. As she stood by the fire washing herself--she was
proud to wash herself at this time--and he looked at her,
his heart was full of extreme tenderness for her. Such fine,
fine limbs, her slim, round arms like chasing lights, and her
legs so simple and childish, yet so very proud. Oh, she stood on
proud legs, with a lovely reckless balance of her full belly,
and the adorable little roundnesses, and the breasts becoming
important. Above it all, her face was like a rosy cloud
shining.