“And are you going to marry him?” asked Mrs. Tuke, with a long, cool look.
“I can’t imagine myself—” said Alvina.
“Oh, but so many things happen outside one’s imagination. That’s where your body has you. I can’t imagine that I’m going to have a child—” She lowered her eyelids wearily and sardonically over her large eyes.
Mrs. Tuke was the wife of the son of a local manufacturer. She was about twenty-eight years old, pale, with great dark-grey eyes and an arched nose and black hair, very like a head on one of the lovely Syracusan coins. The odd look of a smile which wasn’t a smile, at the corners of the mouth, the arched nose, and the slowness of the big, full, classic eyes gave her the dangerous Greek look of the Syracusan women of the past: the dangerous, heavily-civilized women of old Sicily: those who laughed about the latomia.
“But do you think you can have a child without wanting it at all?” asked Alvina.
“Oh, but there isn’t one bit of me wants it, not one bit. My flesh doesn’t want it. And my mind doesn’t—yet there it is!” She spread her fine hands with a flicker of inevitability.
“Something must want it,” said Alvina.
“Oh!” said Mrs. Tuke. “The universe is one big machine, and we’re just part of it.” She flicked out her grey silk handkerchief, and dabbed her nose, watching with big, black-grey eyes the fresh face of Alvina.
“There’s not one bit of me concerned in having this child,” she persisted to Alvina. “My flesh isn’t concerned, and my mind isn’t. And yet!—le voilà!—I’m just planté. I can’t imagine why I married Tommy. And yet—I did—!” She shook her head as if it was all just beyond her, and the pseudo-smile at the corners of her ageless mouth deepened.
Alvina was to nurse Mrs. Tuke. The baby was expected at the end of August. But already the middle of September was here, and the baby had not arrived.