“Not for six months or so. But I think my divorce will go through in September, then till March.”

“But the baby will probably be born at the end of February,” she said.

He was silent.

“I could wish the Cliffords and Berthas all dead,” he said.

“It’s not being very tender to them,” she said.

“Tender to them? Yea, even then the tenderest thing you could do for them, perhaps, would be to give them death. They can’t live! They only frustrate life. Their souls are awful inside them. Death ought to be sweet to them. And I ought to be allowed to shoot them.”

“But you wouldn’t do it,” she said.

“I would though! and with less qualms than I shoot a weasel. It anyhow has a prettiness and a loneliness. But they are legion. Oh, I’d shoot them.”