ieved her that Batterham didn't sense God's presence within the natural world. "How can there be no God," Day asked, "when there are all these beautiful things?" (qtd. in Kent 67) His irritation with her "absorption in the supernatural" (Kent 52) would lead them to quarrel. What moved everything to a different plane for her was pregnancy. She had been pregnant once, years earlier, as the result of a love affair with a journalist. This resulted in the !
             great tragedy for her in her life, an abortion. The affair and its awful aftermath had been the subject of her novel, The Eleventh Virgin. (Kent 48-53)
             The abortion, Day concluded in the years following, had left her barren. "For a long time I had thought I could not bear a child, and the longing in my heart for a baby had been growing," (qtd. in Day 52) she confided in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. "My home, I felt, was not a home without one." (qtd. in Day 53) Her pregnancy with Batterham seemed to Day nothing less than a miracle. But Batterham didn't believe in bringing children into such a viol
             ...