February brought fair days, scattered shining celandines like pieces of gold over the garden beds, set the stiff upright daffodil buds drooping and was all too soon driven out by the bleakest March that was ever known, a fierce, detestable month of withering east winds, of starved primroses, and dauntless thrushes singing to their nests in the shaken laurustinus. Jenny began to hate the country itself now, when all she could see of it was savage and forbidding as the people it bred.
In the middle of this gray and blasted month, Jenny became aware that she was going to have a baby. This discovery moved her principally by a sudden revival of self-consciousness so acute that she could scarcely compel herself to break the news even to May. It seemed such an absurd fact when she looked across the table at Zachary somberly munching his pasty. She could hardly bear to sit at meals, dreading every whisper and muffled giggle from the lower end of the table. Although the baby would not arrive till September, and although she tried to persuade herself that it was impossible for anyone to discern her condition, her own knowledge of it dismayed her.
"But it'll be nice to have a baby," said May.
"What, in this unnatural house? I don't think. Oh, May, whatever shall I do? Can't I go away to have it?"
"Why don't you ask him?" suggested May.
"Don't be silly, how can I tell him anything about it?"
"He's got to know some time," May pointed out.
"Yes, but not yet. And then you can tell the old woman and she can tell him, and I'll hide myself up in the bedroom for a week. Fancy all the servants knowing. What a dreadful thing! Besides, it hurts."
"Well, it's no use for you to worry about that part of it now," said May. "I call it silly."
"I hope it'll be a boy," said Jenny. "I love boys. I think they're such rogues."