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MARRIAGE AS A TRADE
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child—at any rate, there was not one living. If there had been, I believe I should have said to her what was in my mind—for the child's sake; I should have hated to think of it growing up in that atmosphere, in its mother's squalid faith in the essential glory of animalism. But as there was no child, and as she was so dulled, so broken, I said nothing. It was all she had—the consciousness that she, from her vantage-ground of completeness and experience, had the right to look down on me—on one of the unmarried, a woman who "could not understand." It was her one ewe-lamb of petty consolation; and I had not the heart to try and take it from her.
