Julia experienced a familiar pang which contracted her breast with an almost physical surprise. It was as if a touch had made her guilty. Why, she could not say. He doesn't want me to show an interest in Bobby! She was robbed of another—almost her last—certainty.
At dinner she watched the father and son stealthily. Their attitude toward each other seemed to confirm her unknown guilt.
"I've sent off your first quarter's tuition at Mount Harrod, young man. You haven't much time left with us."
Bobby was secretly resigned but confident in his petulance. "Gee, Dad, I don't want to go to that place!"
"It's about time you began your initiation in the subtler forms of self-defense," Laurence said sardonically.
May, ignored by everybody, sat very straight in her chair and was over dainty with her food, as if timid of her enjoyment of it. Julia, withdrawing all attempt at contact with Laurence and Bobby, could not bear to look at the girl.
Laurence was uncomfortably admitting to himself that, in some subtle way, his desire to have Bobby out of the house was directed by a feeling against Julia. He wondered how much of his motive she had perceived. The sooner he gets away from the hoax of home, the better, Laurence told himself. He tried to exculpate himself by a generalization. It was the false ideal he wanted to destroy for Bobby. Julia was a part of the myth, though she had not created it.
Julia was wounded without knowing just what her wound was. She said to herself, unexpectedly, If I had a child! My God, if I had a child! The thought, which had been strange to her for a long time, seemed to illumine all of her being. It was as if something warm and secret were already her own. She was on the point of weeping with terror of her longing for the child that did not exist. It was something she wanted to take away to herself which no one else should know of. She considered how she might get herself with child without any one becoming aware of it. She wanted a child that would be helpless with her, that she could give everything to.
But she could not bear the thought of definite responsibilities connected with a child. It was wrong to want a child like that. It was like robbing a thing of its life to want it so completely. It had a right to itself. She felt virtuously bereaved already, as if the child that had never been born had grown to manhood and she had given it up.