"No—a Maori woman."
"Louis! A savage?"
"They aren't savages. But after all, savage doesn't mean anything but wild, untamed. You're that, you know, old lady. Untamed even by motherhood. And I'd have thought that would have tamed even Petruchio's handful. But this Maori woman I was thinking about was in the King Country in New Zealand—You know, I'd read 'The Blue Lagoon' and thought it a bit overdrawn."
"What is it?" she interrupted, pointing to the food imperiously.
"It's about a girl and a boy living on a desert island, and she has a baby without turning a hair. Remembering my nerve-racking experience of maternity in the Borough I thought Stacpoole was rather talking without his book. But when I saw this Maori I felt like sending him my humble apologies by wireless. The tribe was trekking. I was with them for months, you know, in the Prohibition Country. My diagnostic eye had foreseen a birthday and, as a matter of fact, I was getting rather funky and wishing I had Hermann's 'Midwifery' to swot up. I saw myself the hero of the occasion, don't you know, dashing in to save her life, miles from civilization. One morning we were camping by a hot spring for the women to do some cooking and washing. My patient disappeared with an old thing we called Aunt Maggie. Presently we trekked again, and I was feeling horribly uneasy about her, when I nearly dropped. There she was, sailing along in the midst of the other women, with the kid in her arms, looking as cool as a cucumber! Lord, I did feel small!"
He laughed reminiscently, and lighted his pipe.
"It seems right to me," she said, looking away through the drifting smoke. "Why should the coming of life mean pain for someone?"
"Don't know, old lady. But it does. I say, how do you think I'm getting on?"
They looked across the clearing and felt rather proud.
"I love it," he said simply, "taking nature in hand a bit—she's a wicked old harridan, isn't she? A naughty old lady gone wrong! Look at that gorse! We'll have spuds here in no time, and then, in a few years, wheat. I feel I'm making a dint on the face of the earth at last. In a hundred year's time, when I'm forgotten, the effect of these few months' work will be felt. I say, am I talking hot air?"