“I ought to leave you alone,” he said.
“No!” she said. “Love me! Love me, and say you’ll keep me. Say you’ll keep me! Say you’ll never let me go, to the world nor to anybody.”
She crept close against him, clinging fast to his thin, strong naked body, the only home she had ever known.
“Then I’ll keep thee,” he said. “If tha wants it, then I’ll keep thee.”
He held her round and fast.
“And say you’re glad about the child,” she repeated. “Kiss it! Kiss my womb and say you’re glad it’s there.”
But that was more difficult for him.
“I’ve a dread of puttin’ children i’ th’ world,” he said. “I’ve such a dread o’ th’ future for ’em.”
“But you’ve put it into me. Be tender to it, and that will be its future already. Kiss it!”
He quivered, because it was true. “Be tender to it, and that will be its future.”—At that moment he felt a sheer love for the woman. He kissed her belly and her mound of Venus, to kiss close to the womb and the foetus within the womb.
“Oh, you love me! You love me!” she said, in a little cry like one of her blind, inarticulate love cries. And he went in to her softly, feeling the stream of tenderness flowing in release from his bowels to hers, the bowels of compassion kindled between them.
And he realized as he went in to her that this was the thing he had to do, to come into tender touch, without losing his pride or his dignity or his