her duty by him; she hired a reliable woman to take charge of
him, and she was careful to appear at regular hours to nurse him.
She ordered toys for him, and as she shared the naive conviction
of her day that church-going and religion were synonymous, she
began, when he was four years old, to take him to church. In her
shiny, shabby black silk, which had been her Sunday costume ever
since it had been purchased as part of her curiously limited
trousseau she sat in a front pew, between the two children, and
felt that she was doing her duty to both of them. A sense of duty
without maternal instinct is not, perhaps, as baleful a thing as
maternal instinct without a sense of duty, but it is sterile; and
in the first few years of her bereavement, the big, suffering
woman seemed to have nothing but duty to offer to her child.
Nannie's puzzles began then. "Why don't Mamma hug my baby
brother?" she used to ask the nurse, who had no explanation to
offer. The baby brother was ready enough to hug Nannie, and his
eager, wet little kisses on her rosy cheeks sealed her to his
service while he was still in petticoats. Blair was three years
old before, under the long atrophy of grief, Sarah Maitland's
maternal instinct began to stir. When it did, she was chilled by
the boy's shrinking from her as if from a stranger; she was
chilled, too, by another sort of repulsion, which with the
hideous candor of childhood he made no effort to conceal. One of
his first expressions of opinion had been contained in the single
word "uggy," accompanied by a finger pointed at his mother.
Whenever she sneezed--and she was one of those people who cannot,
or do not, moderate a sneeze--Blair had a nervous paroxysm. He
would jump at the unexpected sound, then burst into furious
tears. When she tried to draw his head down upon her scratchy
black alpaca breast, he would say violently, "No, no! No, no!" at