This night she saw with fatal clearness that since he went to school he
had never wanted her at all. She had tried so many years to believe that
he did, till it had become part of her life, as it was part of her
life to say her prayers night and morning; and now she found it was all
pretence. But, lying awake, she still tried to believe it, because to
that she had been bound when she brought him, firstborn, into the world.
Her other son, her daughters, she loved them too, but it was not the
same thing, quite; she had never wanted them to want her, because that
part of her had been given once for all to George.
The street noises died down at last; she had slept two hours when they
began again. She lay listening. And the noises and her thoughts became
tangled in her exhausted brain--one great web of weariness, a
feeling that it was all senseless and unnecessary, the emanation of
cross-purposes and cross-grainedness, the negation of that gentle
moderation, her own most sacred instinct. And an early wasp, attracted
by the sweet perfumes of her dressing-table, roused himself from the
corner where he had spent the night, and began to hum and hover over the
bed. Mrs. Pendyce was a little afraid of wasps, so, taking a moment
when he was otherwise engaged, she stole out, and fanned him with her
nightdress-case till, perceiving her to be a lady, he went away.
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