XI
On that morning of the day before Christmas, Mary Chavah woke early, while it was yet dark. With closed eyes she lay, in the grip of a dream that was undissipated by her waking. In the dream she had seen a little town lying in a hollow, lighted and peopled, but without foundation.
"It isn't born yet," they told her, who looked with her, "and the people are not yet born."
"Who is the mother?" she had asked, as if everything must be born of woman.
"You," they had answered.
On which the town had swelled and rounded and swung in a hollow of cloud, globed and shining, like the world.
"You," they had kept on saying.
The sense that she must bear and mother the thing had grasped her with all the sickening force of dream fear. And when the dream slipped into the remembrance of what the day would bring her, the grotesque terror hardly lessened, and she woke to a sense of oppression and coming calamity such as not even her night of decision to take the child had brought to her, a weight as of physical faintness and sickness.
"I feel as if something was going to happen," she said, over and over.