“She?” Josef stuttered, half because he always said he wanted a boy, and half because he was cold. Besides, conversation about the baby bothered him. He kept getting the feeling that he actually knew more about the affair than was good for him to know. Snatches of dream encounters with Lydia stirred in his mind.

“She looked like you,” Bianka said, “Except that she was blonde-haired like me.”

“If she looks like me, God help her,” Josef said, snorting.

“Maybe it was a true dream. Maybe I really saw her—”

“Old wives’ tales. It was just a plain dream,” Josef said, more gruffly than he intended, because Bianka’s dream actually made him uneasy in a way he couldn’t fathom. His brown moustache bristled. He stared around, suspiciously.

“What are you looking for? The stork?” Bianka asked. She giggled suddenly. “You look so funny, so gruff. And scared.”

“I’m not scared. Scared of what?” he demanded.

“Of being a father,” she said, adding half coquettishly, “You should have thought of that before.”

“Before what?” he asked, grinning but still uncomfortable in the big bed where he had to treat her as if she were a virgin instead of a wife. The goose-feather mattress softly followed her body contours. He imagined the two of them yelling and shouting in homey ecstasy. He reached out for her, stopped his hand in midair and, instead, lit the bedside candle. “I’ll just be glad when we can do it again,” he muttered.

“It? It? Do what?” she asked softly. She was growing drowsy. She wondered if the baby was sleeping inside her now. “It’ll all be over soon,” she said.

He didn’t answer, though he wanted to; because, he brooded, she’d never really be the same again. She’d be nursing the baby for months, for one thing. He blushed, thinking of it, mentally seeing the full bared breasts, bodice-loosened. They’d cavort again, but not, he was sure, as they had, like merry damn puppies without a care in the world. His youth, at twenty-six, was gone, and hers at twenty-three. And they were lucky. But Christ, the trouble was that their youth wasn’t gone. It kept lingering and wouldn’t give up. “You’d do it in a minute if you could, wouldn’t you?” he asked, feeling better momentarily. After all, he wasn’t dead yet!

“I’m a born slut,” she said sleepily; smiling because the phrase always cheered him up and made him feel more like an artist with his mistress than like a farmer with his wife. She half roused. It made her feel that way too.

Lydia said nervously, “Let’s get out of here. I feel claustrophobic.” She and Seven had been silently and invisibly standing there.

Josef managed a fake smile. He said, “Your mother gave me one of the straw cots to sleep on. She treats me like a kitchen hand.”

“She does not!”