A daughter like Alice. If she had had a child. A child of Herrick's. It might have been ten or eleven years old, now. It was very strange to think of a child of Herrick's. She had never wanted a child of his, never for an instant. She remembered, vividly, the Sunday she had lain under the trees and thought of the possibility of a child that would have Herrick's high laugh. How queer it had made her feel! That was the same day she had asked her mother about the scene in the old Webster Street house, and Martha had let the match burn her fingers.
And Gregory's child. It would have been a little thing, scarcely more than a baby yet, not nearly as old as Puck the day she had told Puck stories and waited for Margaret to come home.
Franklin's child. Gregory's child.
For the first time Jean linked the two in the possibility of their fatherhood of her child. And for the first time, a child stood out as a separate entity, a distinct individual, owning its own existence. Her child. A part of herself, yet more its own self. A unit of "this generation," the generation in which she had felt, until this moment, that she herself belonged.
But she did not belong. She had no part in it. There was a chasm between it and herself. Forward across the chasm there was nothing. Back, there was Martha's grave.
"What do you think Alice told me?" The intonation caught Jean's attention and brought it to the man beside her. "I suggested that if she wanted to be really logical, she should have no ceremony at all. She said it was so inconvenient when you went to hotels, or among people who didn't understand. Imagine! Advancing that as a reason. I suggested that, under such pressure, she might lie about it, and she said, 'Lying always smothers things up. It isn't clean.'"
"She's right."
"Of course she's right. But how modern it is! She doesn't logically believe in a ceremony. She doesn't believe that marriage has anything to do with religion and she thinks, or thinks she thinks, that in time even the civil ceremony will vanish."
"It will."
"Of course it will. But nothing would induce Alice, or any of the young people here, to say honestly that they are afraid. Fear is a terrible bugaboo. They're too young to know that it is the deepest rooted instinct in the race. And so they wiggle out of the dilemma by an exaltation of—cleanliness. Terribly modern, like cold baths and exposed plumbing."