"I mind your saying anything," said Lucy, "just now. Don't say things: it makes them alive. It's hot, and you're tired, and I'm not going to stay any more."
She got up from the floor and stood for a moment looking down at Rhoda. Rhoda saw her eyes, how they were wet and strange and far-away, and full of what seemed an immense weight of pity; pity for all the sadnesses of mankind.
The next moment Lucy's cool finger-tips touched her forehead in a light caress, and Lucy was gone.
CHAPTER XV
THE LOSS OF A WIFE
In September Peter and Rhoda had a son, whom they called Thomas, because, Peter said, he had a sceptical look about the eyes and nose. Peter was pleased with him, and he with Peter. Rhoda wasn't much interested; she looked at him and said he was rather like Peter, and might be taken away now, please.
"Like me?" Peter wondered dubiously. "Well, I know I'm not handsome, but..."
Peggy, a born mother, took Thomas into her large heart at once, with her out-at-elbows infants, and was angry with Rhoda for not showing more interest.
"You'd think, from the way of her, that it was her thirteenth instead of her first," she complained to Hilary. "I've no patience with the silly, mooning child. She's nothing like good enough for Peter, and that's a fact, and she'd have a right to realise it and try to improve for very shame, instead of moping the way she does. It's my belief, Hilary, that her silly little heart's away after the Vyvian man, whatever haunt of wickedness he's adorning now. I don't want to believe it of her; but there's no end to the folly of the human heart, is there, now? I wish she was a Catholic and had a priest to make her take shame to herself; but there's no hold one has over her as it is, for she won't say a word to me beyond 'Yes' and 'No,' and 'Take him away, please, he tires me.' I nearly told her she'd a right not to be so easily tired by her own son now she's getting her health. But there, she's a poor frail thing and one can't speak roughly to her for fear she breaks in two."