Until then, the semester had gone quietly enough. Betsy had settled into pregnancy as into a comfortable garment, and ever since the baby had begun to kick she had lost that dazed feeling the book had warned her about, of being a cow in a pasture, or a madonna in a frame. It was as if the baby kicked her into alertness. At school she was. energetic and even amiable, even in the Johnson-Boswell seminar for which she’d thought she’d lost her enthusiasm. Boswell seemed no longer a dull dog but the delightfully neurotic reporter who always tickled her. “Remember the dignity of human nature,” he had written in his youthful enthusiasm for virtue. “Remember everything may be endured.” Betsy wondered what Boswell would have done, if he had been a woman and in her situation? what Johnson would have done? what Rose Deasy would have done, pregnant out of wedlock and forced to face the world with the wages of her sin? Thrown herself into the Thames, probably. Boswell and Johnson would have gotten out of it, somehow; Rose Deasy would have perished on it.
