"I shall bring Gertie to see these to-morrow," she thought. "It will please her frightfully to come, and she'll stop me from being too extravagant. Only I must arrange it so that her work won't be interfered with. Perhaps at lunch time. Never do to upset discipline right at the start!"
And she asked to see still more stock. The articles stimulated her memory and her imagination into a kind of tranquil and yet rapturous contemplation of the events, voluptuous, tender and tragic, which had set her where she was. The thrill of conception, the long patience of gestation, the coming terror of labour mingled all together in her now mystical mind. Her destiny had been changed, or at least it was gravely diverted. Instead of glittering in public as the lovely darling and blossom of luxurious civilization, and in private rendering a man to the highest possible degree happy--instead of this she was secretly and obscurely building a monument, in her body and also in her heart, to Felix--Felix whom already she had raised to be the perfect man, Felix who might have been alive then if she had not one evening behaved like a child, or if his sense of his duty towards her had not been so imperious. (Her commonsense had at last cured her of regarding herself as his murderess.) Whether she had loved him to the height of which she was capable of passionate love was doubtful. But she had profoundly admired him; she had been passionately grateful to him for his love of her; and, come what might when her beauty was restored to its empire, no other man could ever stand to her in the relation in which Felix had stood. He had set his imprint upon her and created her a woman. And so she was creating him a god.
All these movements of her brooding mind originated from the spectacle of the articles on the counter. They did not prevent her from discussing layettes with the bright, rosy, shop-girl. That innocent, charming and unimaginative young creature fingered the treasures with the casualness of use. For her layettes were layettes, existing of and for themselves; they connoted nothing.
PRINTED IN ENGLAND BY CASSELL & COMPANY, LIMITED, LONDON, E.C.4.
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WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
NOVELS
A Man from the North
Helen With the High Hand
Anna of the Five Towns
The Card
Leonora
The Regent
A Great Man
The Lion's Share
Sacred and Profane Love
Clayhanger
Whom God Hath Joined
Hilda Lessways
Buried Alive
These Twain
The Old Wives' Tale
The Roll Call
The Glimpse
The Pretty Lady
The Price of Love
Mr. Prohack
FANTASIAS
The Ghost
Teresa of Watling Street
The Grand Babylon Hotel
The Loot of Cities
The Gates of Wrath
Hugo
The City of Pleasure