Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner

races, that the boy would bear little or no resemblance to Julius, and might well be no more than a woolly negro. But the boy who stepped from the carriage and walked towards her up the sunlit steps might have come, not from any surmisable country, but from a star, and before his extreme beauty and grace she felt her mouth opening like that of any bumpkin.
    Could this beauty be for her sight alone? She heard a servant whisper, “What a little blackamoor!” Fools! she said to herself; and like one with something at stake she awaited the moment when her children should be introduced to the newcomer.
    The minds of Damian and Augusta had also been arranged beforehand. They had been told something of the colour question, and of the rational humanitarianism which forbids that any race should toil as slaves when they would toil more readily as servants; they had been told, more practically, not to stare and not to be shy. They had also been told (though the question of bastardy had been left undiscussed) not to be too familiar.
    Augusta’s conduct was all that could have been asked of her. She had come forward prettily, said her greetings, held out her hand, glanced with her blue eyes as though they beheld nothing out of the ordinary. Damian had both stared and been shy, but his conduct had better pleased his mother. It was obvious that the arrival of this dusky piece of romance had stirred him deeply; and Sophia found herself moved towards her son not as a child but as a companion. His admiration corroborated hers, sanctioned it almost; she was knit to Damian, not by the common bond that tethers a mother to her child, but by the first intimation of that stronger link that time might forge, the close tremulous excited dependence of the woman upon the male she has brought forth. Flying out into the future, launched there the faster by the weighted impetus of her practical character, she decided that Caspar must be present, and honoured, too, at Damian’s coming of age.
    Meanwhile the two boys were walking across the lawn, Damian a little stiffly holding the newcomer’s hand.
    Augusta’s carefully adjusted sigh intimated that she wished to receive attention.
    “How do you like Caspar? Do you think you will be friends with him?”
    “I like him very much. Is he a heathen?”
    “No, of course not.”
    “Oh!”
    Regret was implied.
    “Did you want him to be a heathen, Augusta?”
    “No, not exactly. But if he had been I had a plan, that’s all.”
    “To convert him?”
    Sophia’s voice had gone a little dry. Once again Papa’s cool shade had neared her, remarking on what one might expect if one chose the nurse for respectable piety. Religion was all very well, and a certain amount of it was necessary, no doubt, if only to comply with custom. Papa himself would have been the first to agree to that. But Sophia did not wish her children to be too religious. Untimely piety, not only in story-books, allured untimely deaths.
    “No.”
    “Why did you want him to be a heathen, then, my darling?”
    Augusta did not answer. She fidgeted, and stared across the lawn. Suddenly she began to cry.
    “My love, my little one, what is it? What is the matter? Don’t you feel well?”
    “Mamma, Mamma! Don’t let us ever go to that place again.”
    “The lime-kiln?”
    There was no doubt in Sophia’s mind as to what place Augusta meant. The child’s long shudders vibrated against her bosom, this life she encompassed with her anxious arms was separate and inarticulate to her as an animal’s, it was as though the fiddle should suddenly take a personal life upon it, wailing against the player’s shoulder.
    “Of course we won’t go there again if it frightens you. There will be no need to go. Your cough is almost cured, isn’t it?”
    Though a child be born, nursed, the creature and study of endless nourishing days, she thought, it is never one’s own to understand. Its every movement bruises one, is as terrifying and