And what did little Maudie have to say?

He was as unconcerned as, well, soup. He went on smoothly drinking his soup. She found herself rolling pellets from a square of bread.

Maudie took her usual time to say nothing at all, she said.

Her fingers flattened out a pellet.

You don’t like Maudie, Kitty, he said.

As if I – why, she said, why should I waste my time disliking Maudie Westmacott?

It was true. What she disliked was his unconcern, and her sudden concentration on his wrist below the cuff, that reminded her of all the small tyrannous ways of physical desire.

No, she said afterwards, long after the subject had lapsed, bending over him in his chair. Why should I dislike Maudie Westmacott?

She kissed him and thought she found on his mouth some cause for reassurance. I’m strong enough for any Maudie Westmacott, she felt.

And the child. Taking careful, leisurely walks, she was never tired of returning to the child. His face she had already formed from old family photographs, already she could even hear his voice. Walking in the leafless Park, withdrawn from its seasons, it seemed, at that time of year, she matched its apparent sterility with her own fruitfulness. She strolled warmly in her furs. Glances passed without encounter over the softening lines of her face, over the rounded line of her figure. There was no contact left between Mrs Standish and the faces in the Park. She was walking in her own landscape, ignoring the champed bit or the bowling hoop.

So that when voices, out of the anonymous voices in the Park, forced her back to a reckoning, she could not take this at first. She had to pause, touching bark beneath her glove, supporting herself against the first tree from the onslaught of approaching voices.

Oh no, Willy, said Maudie. You make me laugh.

She walked with that slight swagger that Maudie Westmacott brought from the joy plank into the Park. She was wearing violets. She was wearing a sable hat.

And for that reason I’m not to be taken seriously, said Willy.

Perhaps.

Well, what’s a man to do about that?

His cane stammered on the asphalt path.

Mrs Standish, rooted by her tree, was thankful at least for the passivity of trees. Because her hand trembled on unresponsive bark. Her thoughts were painfully her own, and her voice, congealed somewhere at the back of her throat. She could feel her face grow shapeless, her feet take the opposite direction from Willy and Maudie Westmacott. I must go home, she said, I must make a scene, or not make a scene, I must escape to something more familiar. Above all she wanted to open her own door, hoping perhaps to find behind it a solution, or some contradiction of what she had seen.

Willy, she said, oh, Willy, in the intimacy of a cab. Here in an enclosed space, her feelings crested over into indignation. It was not an unpleasant indulgence, a sense of injustice. Again if the evidence. She almost resented a possible contradiction. She took out her handkerchief. She held it in a tight, hard ball. Her eyes were hot, bright. Thinking of her child, her baby, it suddenly became her baby, it was too much, the eyes could not resist the additional pathos of motherhood. And she began to cry. It hurt her. The hard, jerky crying that came back at her in the cab, making it more dreadful, like the crying of another person.