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baby Doris, she had often halted in front of baby-carriage shops and gazed enviously at the really nice ones in the windows, and indeed had indulged in dreams of buying the most expensive one on her own account some day, for she had then never doubted but that her future would hold a pram. Oddly enough, as it had turned out, that future was to hold nearly every other kind of manufactured article—telephones, Rolls-Royces, fitted dressing-cases, Paris-to-London aeroplanes, there didn’t seem any limit to what she might buy or use—but never a pram. Yet say what you like, there was something nice about a good pram, about this one, for instance, as the man wheeled it off the floor of its case and on to the concrete, where it stood quivering as Essington’s greyhounds sometimes did, evidently so resilient that it would run nicely over the bumps, so stable that it would not overturn too easily. ‘I don’t say it mightn’t be better finished,’ she pronounced, ‘I don’t suppose it’s one of Hitchings’, but I do say it’s well-built and handy …’
    In the midst of these technical musings a wonder, an exciting wonder, struck her. Whose pram was it anyway? Was that why the little man’s wife could not come down and see her? She imagined the girl who was like her sitting waiting upstairs at one of those windows that overlooked the garage, behind those nice clean Nottingham lace curtains. That must be lovely. One would not have to keep on worrying about trying to make oneself cleverer, because one was doing what was recognised as a whole-time job. Everybody in the house, particularly one’s man, would be thinking of one with kindly concern; there would not be that awful feeling of having to keep up to scratch, of having to win approbation that would be coldly withheld if one’s performance was not good enough. One would be able to sit there resting, waiting, obtaining that peaceful entertainment which animals must know out of the accidents of substances near at hand: pressing the paint blisters on the sun-scorched edges of the shutter, putting one’s eye close to the flaw in the pane and watching how it made the red-gold wall and the surmounting spike of lilac waver as if they were deep under an uncoloured, viscous sea. But the poor young thing had still that awful agony to go through. She shuddered, for like people of almost any age, she hated to think of anyone younger than herself in pain; it perpetually seems to us, whether we are twenty or thirty or forty or fifty, that it is only just in the last two or three months that we have learned how harsh this business of life is and armoured ourselves against it, and we cannot bear to think of mere tender youngsters (as we were before the few months) having to face this dreadful knowledge and assume that armour, which is not light. Oh, poor young thing, poor young thing …
    Perhaps, however, the baby had come already. But the little man would have told her if it had. No, he need not. He might have kept it to the very last, then it would be mentioned casually, lest the Fates should hear and guess how well things were going with him and his wife and do something to spoil it all. She often used to feel like that when she first lived with Essington. But she did wish the little man would say it out now, because if that pram really did belong to him and not to a neighbour it made it all the lovelier that he was so much in love with his wife, since he must have seen her looking ugly and had to look after her. She must know that before she went back to town. It was something to hang on to, knowing that even if you were not happy other people were. She must say something that would lead up to it, though of course he would not tell her if it had not happened. It was only rich smart people who talked about babies before they were born; she had turned scarlet when she first heard them at it. Pondering what she could say that would help him to tell her if he wanted to and not