"Indeed you don't!" Rachael conceded gratefully.
"But I think you overdo it, my dear!" finished her husband kindly. Clarence Breckenridge's wife would have assumed a different attitude during this little talk, but Rachael Gregory felt every word like a blow upon her quivering heart. She could not protest, she could not ignore. Her love for him made this moment one of absolute agony, and it was with the humility of great love that she met him more than halfway.
"You're right, of course, Greg, and it must have been stupid for you!" Stupid! It seemed even in this moment treason, it seemed desecration, to use this word of their quiet, wonderful summer together!
"Well," he said, mollified, "don't take what I say too much to heart. It's only that I love my wife, and am proud of her, and I don't want to cut out everything else but Jim's shoes and Mary's day off!" He came over and kissed her, and Rachael clung to him.
"Greg, as if I could be angry with you for being jealous of your son!"
"Trust a woman to put that construction on it," he said, laughing. "You like to think I'm jealous, don't you?"
"I like anything that makes you seem my devoted adorer," Rachael answered wistfully, and smiling whimsically she added, "and I am going to get some new frocks, and give a series of dinners, and win you all over again!"
"Bully!" approved Doctor Gregory, cheerfully going on with his dressing. Rachael watched him thoughtfully for a moment before she went on to her own dressing-room.
Long afterward she remembered that this conversation marked a certain change in her life; it was never quite glad, confident morning again, although for many months no definite element seemed altered. Alice and old Mrs. Gregory had told her, and all the world agreed, that the coming of her child would draw her husband and herself more closely together, but, as Rachael expressed it to herself, it was if she alone moved--moved infinitely nearer to her husband truly, came to depend upon him, to need him as she had never needed him in her life before. But there was always the feeling that Warren had not moved. He stood where he had always been, an eager sympathizer in these new and intense experiences, but untouched and unaltered himself. For her pain, for her responsibility, for her physical limitations, he had the most intense tenderness and pity, but the fact remained that he might sleep through the nights, enjoy his meals, and play with his baby, when the mood decreed, untroubled by personal handicap.
Rachael, like all women, thought of these things seriously during the first year of her child's life, and in February, when Jimmy was beginning to utter his first delicious, stammering monosyllables, it was with great gravity that she realized that motherhood was approaching her again, that at Thanksgiving she would have a second child. She was wretchedly languid and ill during the entire spring, and found her mother-in-law's and Alice Valentine's calm acceptance of the situation bewildering and discouraging.