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224 before anything can possibly happen at all, because he says that if I stopped here I should go flying about and do things that are bad for me. He thinks more about the baby than me. I told him so yesterday, and he was hurt. So I kissed him, and said I didn't mean it. Oh, what a liar I am!"

Maud gave a long sigh.

"Oh, Lucia, how can you say such things?" she asked. "Fancy minding about going down to Brayton. Why, I would go and live at Clapham Junction for a month if it would give my baby an ounce more health, an ounce of better chance. What a strange romance it all is!"

"You and me, do you mean?" asked Lucia.

"Yes. We've always gone parallel, haven't we? Up at Girton first of all; then we fell in love—at least I did a little and you a great deal—with the same man. And now, within a few weeks of each other, less perhaps, we shall give our husbands our first-born child. I do want a boy so much. Do all mothers, do you think?"

"I imagine so," said Lucia. "Fancy what a nuisance a girl would be in eighteen years! How my daughter will hate me, if it is a daughter! Because I shall still be going to balls, and giving them, and making everybody run after me, and I shall be so jealous of her, because she's younger. Oh, I'm not nice, I know that. But it's me, thank God. If she falls in love with some very attractive young man, I know I shall cut her out, and take him for a devoted slave, Number whatever it happens to be."

"Oh, Lucia, don't talk such nonsense!" said Maud.

"Maud, you're a darling!" said Lucia. "And it's dear of you always to tell me I am talking nonsense just when I am saying the things that are most essentially myself. They are very sensible; they are not nonsense. And, as I said before, I'm not filled with rapture at the thought of having a child. I'm not I'm not! And think of all the waste of time that will never come again. How much nicer if one was a hen, and just laid an egg, and got another hen to sit on it, or put it in a Turkish bath, incubator—whatever they call it. I do think it would be an advantage. And I suppose you say that's nonsense too."

Maud laughed.

"I don't think there is any need," she said. "Oh, I remember so well when we sat here, you and I, four years ago, you talked the most awful nonsense. You were just making the most tremendous discoveries"