I

George came into the conjugal bedroom.  The hour was about three o’clock in the afternoon.  Lois lay on the sofa at the foot of the twin beds.  It was perhaps characteristic of her that she sincerely preferred the sofa to her bed.  Sometimes in the night, when she could not sleep, she would get up and go sighing to the sofa, and, with nothing but a slippery eiderdown to cover her, sleep perfectly till George arose in the morning.  Quite contentedly conventional in most matters of mere social deportment, she often resisted purely physical conventions.  A bed was the recognized machine for slumber; hence she would instinctively choose another machine.  Also, the sofa was nearer to the ground.  She liked to be near the ground.  She had welcomed with ardour the first beginnings of the new fashion which now regularly permits ladies to sit on the hearth-rug after a ceremonial dinner and prop their backs with cushions or mantelpieces.  Doubtless a trait of the ‘cave-woman’ that as a girl she had called herself!

She was now stretched on the sofa in a luxurious and expensive ribboned muslin negligee, untidy, pale, haggard, heavy, shapeless, the expectant mother intensely conscious of her own body and determined to maintain all the privileges of the exacting role which nature had for the third time assigned to her.  Little Laurencine, aged eight, and little Lois, aged five, in their summer white, were fondling her, tumbling about her, burying themselves in her; she reclined careless, benignant, and acquiescent under their tiny assaults; it was at moments as though the three were one being.  When their father appeared in the doorway, she warned them in an apparently awed tone that father was there, and that nursey was waiting for them and that they must run off quietly.  And she kissed them with the enormous kiss of a giantess suddenly rendered passionate by a vast uprush of elemental feeling.  And they ran off, smiling confidently at their father, giggling, chattering about important affairs in their intolerable, shrieking voices.  George could never understand why Lois should attempt, as she constantly did, to instil into them awe of their father; his attitude to the children made it impossible that she should succeed.  But she kept on trying.  The cave-woman again!  George would say to himself:  “All women are cave-women.”

“Have you come to pack?” she asked, with fatigued fretfulness, showing no sign of surprise at his arrival.

“Oh no!” he answered, and implied that in his over-charged existence packing would have to be done when it could, if at all.  “I only came in for one second to see if I could root out that straw hat I wore last year.”

“Do open the window,” she implored grievously.

“It is open.”

“Both sides?”

“Yes.”

“Well, open it more.”

“It’s wide open.”

“Both sides?”