Rita and her husband lived opposite Martin's yard. As he came out of it, René was confronted by Ann leaving their house with a basin under her arm.
"I've been seeing Rita," she said. "Joe's been out of work since the coal strike, and he's going on the drink. Her time's coming, and someone's got to do for her. It was for her I took the money."
"I--I beg your pardon, Ann. Why didn't you say so before?"
"It was the way you looked, Renny, dear. You do frighten me so."
"It may be to-morrow. Anyway, soon. Would you mind keeping Joe away? He's not your sort, I know, but he must be kept away."
"All right. He shall be kept away. Is she in for a bad time?"
"I'm afraid she is. Work's been so skeery of Joe these times that it's been all she's been able to do to feed the children."
"That's bad. But she ought to have thought of herself."
"Sometimes," said Ann, "there isn't room for everybody to be thought of. If you can get through a day or two it's as much as you can manage without thinking what's going to happen in a month's time."
"No. What's the good? Whenever I do, it only frightens me."
They had reached their room and she had begun to wriggle out of her clothes.
"I don't like your being frightened, my dear. There's nothing can hurt us, and being hurt is no great thing."
"All in the day's work, eh? Oh, well. Some things. But, don't you see, I think I'm going to be like Rita."
She looked at him queerly, almost maliciously.
"What did y'expect? Making me so fond of you?"
She was stung into silence. Presently she crept into bed and lay with her face to the wall. In a tone of almost petulant disappointment she said at length:
"I fancied that was why you were putting by all that money. I was pleased about that, I was."
René sat on gloomily in the outer room, listening, waiting for her to go to sleep. He was full of resentment against he knew not what. Her almost cynical practicality? Her acceptance without wonder of the new fact? As with the rest of his life, so now he was able to detach himself from her. She had been pleased with him because he had begun to make provision, as she thought, against the probable event. She had announced the event as one regretting the pleasantness of the past, almost as one diffidently presenting a bill--commercialization. Horribly their relationship was stripped of their individualities; they were just a man and a woman separated by that which they had together created. They had known kindness and fellowship, mutual forbearance and gratitude, and now they were despoiled of these good things. He was left impotent while she bowed to the disagreeable fact and was absorbed in it. And he began to see that they had long been borne toward this separation, and to escape from the pain of it he had turned to Kilner and the things of the mind, while she had comforted herself with the things of the flesh, the sufferings of the child-ridden Rita, who now seemed to him typical of the life of the mews, a creature crushed by circumstance, by responsibilities which she could not face, a house which she could not clean, children whom she could neither feed nor clothe, a husband whom she was unable to keep from deterioration. And to think that for one moment he had seen beauty in her, when she had appeared almost as a symbol of maternity, which must be--must it not?--always and invariably beautiful and to be worshiped. His idealism came crumbling down as he could not away with the knowledge that Ann had lost in beauty for him.