He could not understand her attitude. As a man he had retained the primitive joy in the coming of the child, any child,—but his child and the first one above all! Compared with that nothing was of the least importance. Seeing her pouting into the glass, he said reproachfully:—
"But you like children, Belle!"
And taking her again into his arms and kissing her, he added, "We'll give the little beggar a royal welcome, girl!"
His grave face took on a special look of content with the world and his share in it, while Isabelle continued to stare at herself in the glass and think of the change a child would make in her life. Thus the woman of the new generation, with her eagerness for a "large, full life," feels towards that process of nature for which the institution of marriage was primarily designed.
* * * * *
So for a time longer Isabelle tried to ignore the coming fact, to put it out of her mind, and grasp as much of her own life as she could before the life within her should deprive her of freedom. As Lane's new duties would not begin until the summer, it was arranged that Isabelle should spend the hot weeks at the Grafton farm with her mother, and then return to St. Louis for her confinement in her old home. Later they would settle themselves in the city at their leisure…. It was all so provoking, Isabelle persisted in thinking. They might have had at least a year of freedom in which to settle themselves in the new home. And she had had visions of a few months in Europe with Vickers, who was now in Rome. John might have come over after her. To give up all this for what any woman could do at any time!
As the months passed she could not evade the issue. By the time she was settled in her old room at the Farm she had grown anaemic, nervous. The coming of the child had sapped rather than created strength as it properly should have done. White and wasted she lay for long hours on the lounge near the window where she could see the gentle green hills. Here her cousin Alice Johnston found her, when she arrived with her children to make Mrs. Price a visit. The large, placid woman knelt by Isabelle's side and gathered her in her arms.
"I'm so glad, dear! When is it to be?"
"Oh, sometime in the fall," Isabelle replied vaguely, bored that her condition already revealed itself. "Did you want the first one?" she asked after a time.
"Well, not at the very first. You see it was just so much more of a risk. And our marriage was a risk without that…. I hated the idea of becoming a burden for Steve. But with you it will be so different, from the start. And then it always makes its own place, you see. When it comes, you will think you always wanted it!"