"Laurie?" Her fingers picked the cover. She did not look at them, but she knew them, little and thin, and remembered how small they were when he held them in his clumsiness. "Won't you kiss me, Laurie?"
Hating himself for his helplessness, he leaned over her and kissed her.
She lifted her arms to him. "Oh, Laurie, when I'm sick and you feel this way——If I should die, I couldn't bear it!" she said.
"But you won't die, Winnie. You won't die!" He gave up, leaning his face against her hair. Why could they never touch?
He felt the child stir in her against him, and the child seemed so terrible and real that he longed for some terrible realness in them with which to understand the child.
Winnie felt the child stirring between them, and was ashamed. It kept her from remembering sweetly the slightness of her body and the smallness of her pretty outstretched arms. She was ugly and inert at the mercy of the child.
"Love me, Laurie!" she moaned. "I can't help being like this!" She was unfair to him, but the agony in her voice was sweet to her self-contempt.
"Stop, Winnie. You have no right to say things like that." He could not speak any more. He held her close up against him.
To herself she was small and ugly with child in a small dark room. She kissed his hair, stiff and bitter against her mouth. She envied him the wonder of the fear he felt for her.
But, while there was resentment in her, it elated her to inspire this horror of pity. Small and weak as she was, her hands were the hands of joy and agony. She was jealous of her closeness to death, half afraid that the doctor was wrong. She wanted to be in danger. Secretly, her weakness fed on its new strength.