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Lethbury, at first, had resisted the idea of a legal adoption; but
when he found that his wife's curiously limited imagination
prevented her regarding the child as hers till it had been made so
by process of law, he promptly withdrew his objection. On one point
only he remained inflexible; and that was the changing of the waif's
name. Mrs. Lethbury, almost at once, had expressed a wish to
rechristen it: she fluctuated between Muriel and Gladys, deferring
the moment of decision like a lady wavering between two bonnets. But
Lethbury was unyielding. In the general surrender of his prejudices
this one alone held out.
"But Jane is so dreadful," Mrs. Lethbury protested.
"Well, we don't know that _she_ won't be dreadful. She may grow up a
Jane."
His wife exclaimed reproachfully. "The nurse says she's the
loveliest--"
"Don't they always say that?" asked Lethbury patiently. He was
prepared to be inexhaustibly patient now that he had reached a firm
foothold of opposition.
"It's cruel to call her Jane," Mrs. Lethbury pleaded.
"It's ridiculous to call her Muriel."
"The nurse is _sure_ she must be a lady's child."
Lethbury winced: he had tried, all along, to keep his mind off the
question of antecedents.
"Well, let her prove it," he said, with a rising sense of
exasperation. He wondered how he could ever have allowed himself to
be drawn into such a ridiculous business; for the first time he felt
the full irony of it. He had visions of coming home in the afternoon
to a house smelling of linseed and paregoric, and of being greeted
by a chronic howl as he went up stairs to dress for dinner. He had
never been a club-man, but he saw himself becoming one now.
The worst of his anticipations were unfulfilled. The baby was
surprisingly well and surprisingly quiet. Such infantile remedies as
she absorbed were not potent enough to be perceived beyond the
nursery; and when Lethbury could be induced to enter that sanctuary,
there was nothing to jar his nerves in the mild pink presence of his
adopted daughter. Jars there were, indeed: they were probably
inevitable in the disturbed routine of the household; but they
occurred between Mrs. Lethbury and the nurses, and Jane contributed
to them only a placid stare which might have served as a rebuke to
the combatants.
In the reaction from his first impulse of atonement, Lethbury noted
with sharpened perceptions the effect of the change on his wife's
character. He saw already the error of supposing that it could work
any transformation in her. It simply magnified her existing
qualities. She was like a dried sponge put in water: she expanded,
but she did not change her shape. From the stand-point of scientific
observation it was curious to see how her stored instincts responded
to the pseudo-maternal call. She overflowed with the petty maxims of
the occasion. One felt in her the epitome, the consummation, of
centuries of animal maternity, so that this little woman, who
screamed at a mouse and was nervous about burglars, came to typify
the cave-mother rending her prey for her young.
It was less easy to regard philosophically the practical effects of
her borrowed motherhood. Lethbury found with surprise that she was
becoming assertive and definite. She no longer represented the
negative side of his life; she showed, indeed, a tendency to
inconvenient affirmations. She had gradually expanded her assumption
of motherhood till it included his own share in the relation, and he
suddenly found himself regarded as the father of Jane. This was a
contingency he had not foreseen, and it took all his philosophy to
accept it; but there were moments of compensation. For Mrs. Lethbury
was undoubtedly happy for the first time in years; and the thought
that he had tardily contributed to this end reconciled him to the
irony of the means.
At first he was inclined to reproach himself for still viewing the
situation from the outside, for remaining a spectator instead of a
participant. He had been allured, for a moment, by the vision of
severed hands meeting over a cradle, as the whole body of domestic
fiction bears witness to their doing; and the fact that no such
conjunction took place he could explain only on the ground that it
was a borrowed cradle. He did not dislike the little girl. She still
remained to him a hypothetical presence, a query rather than a fact;
but her nearness was not unpleasant, and there were moments when her
tentative utterances, her groping steps, seemed to loosen the dry
accretions enveloping his inner self. But even at such
moments--moments which he invited and caressed--she did not bring
him nearer to his wife. He now perceived that he had made a certain
place in his life for Mrs. Lethbury, and that she no longer fitted
into it. It was too late to enlarge the space, and so she overflowed
and encroached. Lethbury struggled against the sense of submergence.
He let down barrier after barrier, yielded privacy after privacy;
but his wife's personality continued to dilate. She was no longer
herself alone: she was herself and Jane. Gradually, in a monstrous
fusion of identity, she became herself, himself and Jane; and
instead of trying to adapt her to a spare crevice of his character,
he found himself carelessly squeezed into the smallest compartment
of the domestic economy.
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