Under the hourly care of a doctor she was no longer allowed to keep herself awake for fear of dreaming. But there was nothing to occupy her by day, and she brooded eternally on the workings of Jack's mind. A letter from Sonia started the train.
"Bobs darling, the bracelet is divine! Thank you ever so much for it! I didn't write before, because we've been so frightfully busy. I expect you saw that we were married last week. Babs, I'm so happy! I'm at PEACE now. With David I feel so secure. I always USED to think that I should feel circumscribed, but the COMPANIONSHIP'S so wonderful that I don't want anything more. At least, I want to have children—lots and lots of them; and I want David to go on loving me, as he does now; and I want it always to be summer. But I wouldn't change David for any one in the world; and I wouldn't be NOT married.
"Looking back on it all, I don't REGRET anything and I suppose I enjoyed myself, but it seems rather hollow now. We shall lead a very quiet, humdrum life and we shall be frightfully poor, but I think that's where the PEACE comes in. If I'd married poor Jim—though I know he'd have been the most adoring husband—I don't believe the privilege of being 'the beautiful Lady Loring' (if anybody had troubled to call me that!) would have compensated all the ceremony and fuss. I never felt a thousandth part of the love for Jim that I feel for David. I suppose that's the difference. All I ask now is to have David's love for ever and to give him every ounce of mine and to make our lives one. It's a silly thing to say, but, before I married, I never imagined how extraordinarily two lives DO become one. We each of us know what the other's thinking of; we carry on conversations where we only seem to SPEAK one sentence in three—everything else is understood. My dear, we are so happy! You know how I love you, Babs; I only hope that you'll be as happy as I am."
For all its irritating italics and ill-defined emotion, the letter unsettled Barbara. She, too, would like to have children—"lots and lots of them"; the papers pretended that this was an age-old world-instinct and that Woman—in the abstract—was being impelled by an abstract Nature to repair the life-wastage of the war; hence they deduced the absurd scandal of the "war-babies," thus they explained the abundant crop of "war weddings." Barbara's intelligence rebelled against world-instincts as much as against abstract Woman and abstract Nature. She wanted children because she wanted something of her own to love, and her untapped reservoir of devotion had overflowed when she was nursing the boys who pretended that nothing was the matter, when she could see their eyelids flickering with pain. She yearned to lay their heads on her breast and tell them to cry because it would do them good and because she wanted to comfort them.
And she did not see why Sonia should have so much happiness.... "We were married.... We've been so frightfully busy.... We shall lead a very quiet, humdrum life and we shall be frightfully poor.... We each of us know what the other's thinking of...." Barbara writhed at the possessive, participating plural. She was ready to be poor and to live a quiet humdrum life, if she could share it; she appreciated the peace of marriage, so often underlined by Sonia, because it was what she hungered to feel. Eight months had passed since Jack went abroad, twelve since they parted. When she heard that he had been home on leave without communicating with her, she felt sure that he would never communicate with her; but, when the war ended, she must tender her promise again. In the meantime she might fall in love with some one else....
The memory of Jack in the banqueting-hall at Chepstow was replaced by a picture in which he stood, silent and forbidding, between her and some one whom she strove passionately to reach. The image haunted her until she jettisoned her last fragments of pride and wrote to him again.
"I sent you a letter nearly a year ago and I have never had an answer," she began. "I don't think you can have read it, because it would be such a horribly cruel way of punishing me, if you read it and paid no attention. I don't think I asked for mercy or forgiveness, because I didn't deserve either; but, though I behaved unforgivably, I DIDN'T appreciate until it was too late quite what I was doing and quite how much you loved me. I don't want you to think I'm EXCUSING myself; I want you to understand that perhaps I do appreciate rather better now and that I'm ready, as I was then, to do anything in the world that you ask. I've taken a solemn oath. You may accept it generously or refuse it generously; or, if you like, you can just humiliate me—you know I'm vain and you know that's where you can punish me best. Don't play with me! Sometimes I think I'm going out of my mind. I want you to be just and, if you can, to be generous; it will be generosity, if you are able to say that you forgive me, and it will be justice, if you remember that I apologize and ask to be forgiven and offer to do anything that you want—and that there's nothing more I CAN do. I don't DESERVE consideration, but I need it."
Barbara knew that she was too uncertain of herself to trust her own judgement, and the letter was put aside until her mood of abject humility had passed. When she read it again, the terms of her own abasement set her cheeks flaming, but there was no other way of winning peace. She allowed five days for the letter to reach him and another five days for a reply. For the first two nights she never slept; on the third day Dr. Gaisford was summoned, and that afternoon she was despatched to the sea for another three weeks' rest. While there, the tenth day came and went without any reply. Barbara added an eleventh, because letters lost a day in forwarding. It was no less barren than its predecessors, but news came in an unexpected form on the twelfth.