"I have thought of everything," she was saying. "I have some philosophy. I have no foolish sense of this life being all—or death being all, but, oh, I was going to take him his little baby—as soon as it was born. I was at his father’s in Kent, England. And to think that a bit of pink paper and the word _tiger_—"
"My baby would have been as old as that little boy with the silly missionary father," she added.
"Why silly? I only saw a bent drab man with his particular idea of God—"
"Silly because he doesn’t permit the child to hear fairy stories—"
Romney found himself regarding her judgment as quite right.
He thought he was beginning to understand now, yet she seemed to live too powerfully in the present hour to be lost altogether in a tragedy of five years ago. The look of her eyes had to do with the future, not with the past. At the same time there was something tremendous in the slow, still way she had spoken of her child and its father. A magnificent sort of Englishman he must have been to hold this woman’s life to his....
They were on deck again. The wind had gone down. The moon played upon the mists of the ricelands on the southern shore. To the north the river was crowded with small boats and the myriad lights of a low-lying city were fused into a dull red glow. The woman was thrilling him now with every sentence:
"I am not hugging a grief. I see that I gave you that impression. Perhaps I carry it with me—and give it forth from time to time as a matter of habit. It is doubtless as interesting as another, but it is not true. Life is too short to try to make most people understand. If I care enough to explain, I tell a different, a more real story. You are good to talk to. I think I must have been lonely when you came and drew up your chair. That startled me pleasantly—your doing that. At least, I knew you weren’t common. Grown-ups—men and women adults—should dare to be real to each other. How chatty I am—"
"No, I’m not going around the world clinging to an ancient bereavement.... He was a very good man, patient, a man’s man—a tiger-hunter. It’s all in that. I was younger five years ago. I was so young that I thought for a time my future sufficiently wrapped in his. Then I had his baby. That made a kind of devil of me. I had _lived_ those months. I found that there was something huge and endless about that experience. I am not giving you any cant about motherhood. I could smell and taste and see into things as never before. I was in a rage when he went away to hunt tigers. Why, he took it as a matter of mere nature—as something in the natural course of events—that I should bring _his_ child into the world. I was growing into a real creature and he could not rise out of the annual tiger rhamadan. It is a sort of religion with his family—and couldn’t be broken. And then I was smothered in his family. When the word was brought a kind of madness came over me—sorrow—yes, there was real sorrow. I remembered all his good, but the madness had to do with _perpetuating him_—a man who could leave me in that smothering British household.... It seemed I wanted a child that had nothing to do with him—with them.... What I wanted in those days, I wanted with a kind of madness. They said it was my grief that killed the little one. These things are mysterious.... And now—"