He had tried hard to think everything out clearly. What she had wanted was that there be no love-making between them except for the purpose of breeding children. If one went about the business of bringing children into the world, making new citizens for the state and all that, then one could feel a certain dignity in making. She had tried to explain how humiliated and mean she had felt that day when he came into her naked presence. For the first time they had talked of that. It had been made ten times, a thousand times worse because he had come the second time and the others had seen him. The clean moment of their relationship was denied with determined insistence. After that had happened she could not bear to remain in the company of her girl friend and, as for her friend's brother well, how could she ever look into his face again? Whenever he looked at her he would be seeing her not properly clothed as she should be, but shamelessly naked and on a bed with a naked man holding her in his arms. She had been compelled to get out of the house, go home at once, and of course, when she got home, everyone wondered what had happened that her visit had come to such an abrupt end. The trouble was that when her mother was questioning her, on the day after her arrival home, she suddenly burst into tears.

What they thought after that she didn't know. The truth was that she began to be afraid of everyone's thoughts. When she went into her bedroom at night she was almost ashamed to look at her own body and had got into the habit of undressing in the darkness. Her mother was always dropping remarks. "Did your coming home so suddenly have anything to do with the young man in that house?"

After she had come home, and because she began to feel so ashamed of herself in the presence of other people, she had decided she would join a church, a decision that had pleased her father, who was a devout church member. The whole incident had in fact drawn her and her father closer together. Perhaps that was because, unlike her mother, he never bothered her with embarrassing questions.

Anyway she had made up her mind that if she ever married she would try to make her marriage a pure thing, based on comradeship, and she had felt that after all she must marry John Webster if he ever repeated his proposal of marriage. After what had happened that was the only right thing for them both to do and now that they were married it would be right also for them to try and make up for the past by leading clean pure lives and trying never to give way to the animal impulses that shocked and frightened people.

*

John Webster was standing facing his wife and daughter and his mind had gone back to the first night in bed with his wife and to the many other nights they had spent together. On that first night, long ago, when she lay talking to him, the moonlight came in through a window and fell on her face. She had been very beautiful at the moment. Now that he no longer approached her, afire with passion, but lay quietly beside her, with her body drawn a little away and with his arm about her shoulders, she was not afraid of him and occasionally put up her hand and touched his face.