Page:Weeds (1923).pdf/214

 she was heavy with a great lethargy, as if the life within her, in its determination to persist, were slowly and steadily draining her, leaving her body nothing but a shell, a limp, nerveless, irritable, collapsing shell.

She understood now why snakes and woodchucks crawled into their holes in winter. She wished she had a hole to crawl into, a hole where there were no meals to cook, no fire to keep going, no fretful child to pacify—a nice, dark, quiet hole where nobody ever came and where she could curl up and be at peace.

Little Billy was a strong, stirring, loud-voiced, and self-willed child. Often when his clamorous demands became too much for her nerves, she would slap him savagely and force him to blubber into silence, gasping and choking and catching spasmodically at the heaving surges of breath that rose in him like tidal waves. He learned to be afraid of her in these moods and would sidle away and hide under the bed or behind the stove till the storm had passed, peering out at her with scared, watchful eyes, as a puppy watches the foot that has just kicked him. In such moments she hated them both, the born and the unborn, two little greedy vampires working on her incessantly, the one from without, the other from within, never giving her a moment's peace, bent upon drinking her last drop of blood, tearing out her last shrieking nerve.

Sometimes she would give way to one of these fits of irritation when Jerry was in the house; and he would rush to intervene and save the child.

"Why do you act so mean to the young un, Judy?" he would demand, his voice harsh with anger.

"Mebbe you'd act mean too if you was shet up with him all day long, like you was in a jail."

Her mouth set into hard lines, and her level brows contracted darkly.

When she said such things he always looked at her in a puzzled, hurt, and somewhat impatient way.

She no longer looked forward to Jerry's homecoming at night. When he came in from the day's plowing, tired but