miss over
there--a miss for which the mother suffers--when it is not a boy. The
girls of Japan carry their brothers until they begin to carry their
sons. You need only look at this picture to know that here is a people
messing with uniforms and explosives, a people still hot with the ape
and the tiger in their breasts."

Beth was thinking that America was not yet aeons distant from this
Japanese institution, the male incubus of the girl child. She did not
speak, for she was thinking of what she had said in the studio--of the
edginess of her temper. "Spinsters may scold, but not spiritual
mothers," she thought. She might have been very happy, but for a mental
anchor fast to that gloomy mood of the morning.... Hours had flown
magically. It was past mid-afternoon.... There was one more picture
that had held him, not for itself, but like the Japanese scene, for the
thoughts it incited.... An aged woman in a cheerless room, bending over
the embers of a low fire. In the glow, the weary old face revealed a
bitter loneliness, and yet it was strangely sustained. The twisted
hands held to the fire, would have fitted exactly about the waist of a
little child--which was not there.

"I would call her _The Race Mother_," Bedient said reverently. "She is
of every race, and every age. She has carried her brothers and her
sons; given them her strength; shielded them from cold winds and
dangerous heats; given them the nourishment of her body and the food
prepared with her hands. Their evils were her own deeper shame; their
goodness or greatness was of her conceiving, her dreams first. Her sons
have turned to her in hunger, her mate in passion, but neither as their
equal. For that which was noble in their sight and of good report, they
turned to men. In their counsels they have never asked her voice; they
suffered her sometimes to listen to their devotions, but hers were
given to them_.

"They were stronger. They chose what should become the intellectual
growth of the race. Having no part in this, her mind was stunted,
according to their standards. She had the silences, the bearing, the
services for others, the giving of love. She loved her mate sometimes,
her brothers often, her sons always,--and served them. Loving much, she
learned to love God. Silences, and much loving of men, one learns to
love God. Silences and services and much loving of her kind--out of
these comes the spirit which knows God.

"So while her men, like childre