But all this--he argued with a sudden taste for fine
discrimination--had not been done out of mere anxiety for his life: it was
not the barren solicitude of a nurse but the deliberate, luxurious regard of
a mother for his comfort: no doubt it represented the ungovernable overflow
of the maternal, long pent-up in her ungratified. And by this route he came
at last to a thought of her that novel for him--the pitying recollection of
her childlessness.
"What a mother she would have been!" he said rebelliously. "The mother of
sons who would have become great through her--and greater through the memory
of her after she was gone."
When she came again, seeing him out of danger and seeing him comfortable,
she seated herself beside his table and opened her work."It isn't good for
you to talk much," she soon said reprovingly, "and I have to work--and to
think."
And so he lay watching her--watching her beautiful fingers which never
seemed to rest in life--watching her quiet brow with its ripple of lustrous
hair forever suggesting to him how her lovely neck and shoulders would be
buried by it if its long light waves were but loosened.
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