Again she moved restlessly up and down the room.
“But whatever happens,” she said, “I shall never regret having written it. It really kept me alive and sane, Peggy, during the first two years after Dennis’s death. I think I must have gone mad otherwise. But the bringing to birth of that child of one’s brain kept me alive; and whether it proves to be a miserable little deformed cripple or a healthy baby is another question.”
Peggy rose to go.
“Ah, you darling!” she said, kissing her. “And it is all healed now, is it not?”
Edith smiled at her.
“Yes, I think it is healed,” she said. “But you know things can’t be quite the same; it can never be quite as if those years had never happened. If one has had a wound, a burn, though the skin grows over it and the doctors say it has healed perfectly, yet it isn’t soft and smooth like other skin. It is hard, as if Nature instinctively gave an extra protection over the place that had been hurt. And this was over my heart, dear.”
Peggy sighed.
“I know you think like that,” she said, “but you won’t always. Think how much you have regained of yourself in these three years. How much of you there is again, when a year or two ago, dear Edith, there was so little of anything. Make it complete again some day.”
“Marry, do you mean?” asked she.
“Why, of course. No woman is herself until she finds her man. And really, dear, you are beginning to sit up and take notice, as they say of children. Do find him!”