“You don’t suppose he was only thinking of the present moment, do you?”
Thérèse had no longer any need to ask her if she was unhappy. She could feel her misery in the darkness: but she did not pity her. Why should she? How delightful it must be to repeat a name, a Christian name, that stands for a certain being to whom one’s heart is bound so closely! The mere thought that he is living, breathing, and sleeping at night with his head upon his folded arm; that he wakes at dawn, and his young body moves through the mists of morning....
“Why, you’re crying, Thérèse: is it because of me? You must be fond of me.”
The child had knelt down and laid her head against Thérèse’s side, when she suddenly started back:
“I felt something moving against my forehead....”
“Yes, it began to move a few days ago.”
“The little one?”
“Yes, it’s alive already.”
They had come back to the house, with their arms round each other as they used to do along the road to Nizan, or Argelouse. Thérèse remembered that she had been afraid of that fluttering burden. How many passions were to make their way into that as yet unformed flesh. She saw herself as she had sat that evening in her bedroom, by the open window (Bernard had shouted up from the garden: “Don’t light the lamp because of the mosquitoes”). She counted the months before the birth, she would have liked to have known a God who might answer her prayer that this unknown creature, still intermingled with her body, might never see the light.