Flora approached the hut in some trepidation. Her practical experience of confinements was non-existent, for such of her friends as were married had not yet any children and most of them were still too young to think of marriage as anything but a state infinitely remote.
But she had a lively acquaintance with confinements through the works of women novelists, especially those of the unmarried ones. Their descriptions of what was coming to their less fortunate married sisters usually ran to four or five pages of close print, or eight or nine pages of staccato lines containing seven words, and a great many dots arranged in threes.
Another school dismissed confinements with a careful brightness, a 'So-sorry-I'm-late-darling-I've-just-been-having-a-baby-where-shall-we-go-for-supper-afterwards?' sangfroid which Flora, curiously enough, found equally alarming.
She sometimes wondered whether the old-fashioned, though doubtless lazy, method of describing the event in the phrase, 'She was brought to bed of a fine boy', was not the best way of putting it.
A third type of woman novelist combined literature and motherhood by writing a good, serious first novel when they were twenty-six; then marrying, and having a baby, and the confinement over, writing articles for the Press on 'How I shall Bring Up my Daughter', by Miss Gwenyth Bludgeon, the brilliant young novelist, who gave birth to a daughter this morning. Miss Bludgeon is in private life Mrs Neil McIntish.
Some of Flora's friends had been exceedingly frightened, not to say revolted, by these painstaking descriptions of confinements; and had been compelled to rush off to the Zoo and bribe the keepers to assure them that the lionesses, at least, got through the Greatest Event of Their Lives in decent solitude. It was comforting, too, to watch the lionesses cuffing their fubsy cubs about in the sunlight. The lionesses, at least, did not write articles for the papers on how they would Bring Up their Cubs.
Flora had also learned the degraded art of 'tasting' unread books, and now, whenever her skimming eye lit on a phrase about heavy shapes, or sweat, or howls or bedposts, she just put the book back on the shelf, unread.
Musing thus, she was relieved when a voice replied: 'Oo's there?' to her tap upon the door of the hut.
'Miss Poste, from the farm,' she answered, composedly. 'May I come in?'
There was a silence; a startled one, Flora felt. At length the voice called suspiciously:
'What do 'ee want wi' me and mine?'
Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists call a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake. The most ordinary actions became, to such persons, entangled in complicated webs of apprehension and suspicion. She prepared to make a long explanatory statement – but suddenly changed her mind. Why should she explain? Indeed, what was there to explain?
She pushed the door open and walked in.
To her relief, there were no sweat nor howls nor bedposts. There was only a young woman whom she presumed to be Meriam, the hired girl, sitting over an oil stove and reading what Flora, who had a nice sense of atmosphere, at once identified as 'Madame Olga's Dream Book'. Baby there was none, and she was puzzled. But she was too relieved to wonder much what the explanation could be.
The hired girl (who was, of course, rather sullen-looking and like a ripe fruit) was staring at her.
'Good morning,' Flora began, pleasantly, 'are you feeling better? Mrs Starkadder seems to think you will be about again in a day or two, and if you feel well enough, I want you to wash the curtains in my bedroom. When can you come up to the farm and fetch them?'
