city to produce.
And love is the genius of mothering, the greatest of all the arts. The
love that a man inspires in a woman's heart is _her_ expression of the
Holy Spirit. According to the degree and beauty of that love, does the
woman's child lift its head above the brute; according to the greater
or lesser expression of this Mystic Motherhood in the world, at a
certain hour, must be determined the morality of the race.

A fortnight in New York had terrorized Bedient. He perceived that men
had not humility, nor passionate appreciation for anything; that they
were dazed with their own or other men's accumulations; that they
destroyed every dream of woman, drove the kingdom of heaven from her
heart, with their comings and their goings and their commonness. He
came to believe that this was an age of impossible men, impossible
lovers, artists, and critics, because they had not the delicacy and
wisdom to accept the finer forces, which women bring into the world for
men.

Indeed, he saw that this was woman's gray hour of restless hoping,
pitiful dreaming and untellable pain; that out of these must come the
new generation. Then it appeared to him with splendid cheer, that woman
had not fallen to these modern miseries, but _risen_ to them, from a
millenium of serfdom, untimely outraging, hideous momentary loving,
brute mastery, ownership and drudgery.... These of to-day were finer
sufferings; this an age of transition in which she was passing through
valleys of terrible shadow, but having preserved her natural greatness
through the milleniums, she could not fail now with her poor gleanings
of real love to give the world a generation of finer-grained men.

Women, then, he thought, have a natural greatness which man cannot
destroy. If men were able to destroy it, the sources of the saving
principle of the race would be shut off. But marvellously can man
_inspire_ this natural greatness, make it immense and world-swaying by
bringing out the best of women, and yet how few have this chivalry!
Here was the anguish, the failure. With his mind filled with these
illimitable possibilities, Bedient was overcome with his insight of New
York, the awfulness of ignorance and cruelty in the ordinary relations
of man with woman.

Bedient firmly believed that if women were granted (a heavenly
dispensation, it would have to be) a decade of happiness beginning now,
a decade of lovers of their own choosing, men of delicacy and wisdom,
that th