It was soon after this that I first knew I was going to have
a baby. I went to see a doctor called Mrs. Chilcote, whose name
I had seen on a brass plate at right angles to our road. She
was a nice person; efficient I think, but like Mollie, not like
Maud. She was kind to me afterwards very often. Then I went out
on the heath and sat down on a seat under a tree; it was a birch
tree and the little yellow leaves fluttered down from the tiny
branches and I tried to think what it meant. It seemed to me
then too wonderful almost to be true. I would have a son, I felt
sure of that, and he would be all that I was not, and that Walter
was not, nor Hugo; it seems funny now to remember that I thought
all that; it did not strike me as improbable at all that my son
should be perfect and all I could wish him to be, and I thought
of my own relation to him—how I would be a perfect mother to
him, as Cousin Delia had been to Guy and Hugo, as she had been
even to me; that too did not seem difficult or unlikely to me.
I thought:
‘I will never misunderstand him, nor be cross, nor wish him different
from what he is.’
Other mothers made those mistakes, I knew, but I would not; and
I thought of my son and worshipped him, shutting my eyes on the
seat under the birch tree.
When Walter came home and I told him he kissed me and said he
was glad, but he did not seem very much interested.
There had been some hitch at his College that afternoon. One
of his lectures had been announced at the wrong time and he had
not been there; he was thinking about that.