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ninety-nine suburban babies out of a thousand were born in the suburban beds which had seen their engendering. The average wife would never have dreamed of going cold-bloodedly elsewhere for her confinement, especially when domestic servants were still common. Suburban nursing homes and restaurants and all the other insidious wreckers of home life were only to burgeon into full blossom with the lack of domestic servants. The Salisbury Nursing Home was a little before its time; its ‘Surgical’ and ‘General’ departments were merely heroic gestures, and even its ‘Maternity’ side never flourished. The venture came to a disastrous end after a year’s struggle, but that year saw the arrival of Agatha’s child.
    Agatha made her arrangements with Doctor Walters’s full approval, for the doctor, with lingering happy memories of hospital experience and trained assistance and proper appliances, was thoroughly dissatisfied with the makeshifts he usually had to employ in practice, with curtained rooms and feather beds and all the other hideously unhygienic arrangements with which mothers could find no fault. So it was with a strange excited feeling that one day Agatha walked round to the Salisbury Nursing Home with Mrs. Rodgers at her side, carrying the historic suitcase, the suitcase which was accompanying her for the third successive occasion on a great adventure. Agatha liked it all: she liked the bare, clean rooms and the trim, efficient nurses and the cheerfully unsympathetic aspect of the place; for Agatha was of a Spartan turn of mind mostly.
    She looked on pain as a necessary part of life; she had been imbued since childhood with notions about ‘the curse of Eve’ and similar predestinate ideas; she knew (and it tortured her) that she had ‘sinned’, and she went unshrinkingly forward. The grit that had carried her father from errand-running to wholesaling took her into maternity without a tremor or a regret. The slight pains came, and she was packed away into bed; Doctor Walters called, was unhesitatingly cheerful, and went away again. And then the real pains came, wave after wave of them, so that she found herself flung into a sea of pain of an intensity she had not believed possible. The smooth, efficient face of the nurse, and Doctor Walters’s, with its kindly detachment, floated into her consciousness and out again through a grey mist. She caught a whiff of ether, but at the time she had no idea that it was being used on her. Then it was all over (Agatha, looking back, would have said that it had only taken half an hour or so) and she was free to hold her child on her arm for a few wonderful minutes. The delights of motherhood were very obvious and none the less pleasant. It was a boy of course. Agatha had been quite certain of it from the first. Nothing else could have been possible. Agatha to her dying day never realized that it was only a successful even chance, and not a fixed, settled certainty.

CHAPTER SIX
    S HE CALLED HIM Albert; goodness knows why. She would not have ‘Dick’, which one might have thought her natural choice. Somewhere within her she realized that Richard Saville-Samarez did not possess quite as much brain as she would like her child to have, and she would take no chances. She had hesitated over ‘George’, but had put it aside in case she ever encountered her family again, for ‘George’ was her father’s name as well as her favourite brother’s, and she would not have them think that the child was called after them; for it might give them a feeling of proprietary interest, and she did not want that; Albert was all her own. So she chose Albert’. She knew personally no one of that name at all, which satisfied her jealous desire for possession, while about the name there clung a flavour of association with the Royal Family which endeared it to her rather bourgeois little heart.
    And Albert Brown grew up and developed just as other babies did, although Agatha would have