in a more angry manner
her former directions and assurances on this subject.

"After a very spare dinner she was more attentive to my trouble. She
said it had become a serious question in nearly all married lives--"

"I deny that, Jane. The large majority of women, I am sure, when they
marry do not hold themselves outraged and degraded by the consequences,
nor do they consider natural functions less honorable than social ones.
Money can release a woman from work, but it cannot release her from any
service of love."

"Men forget very easily the physical sufferings of wives. I love our
little Martha as well as, perhaps better than, you do, but I remember
clearly that for nearly a whole year I endured the solitude, sickness,
and acute suffering of maternity. And whatever else you do, you will
_never_ persuade me to like having children. And pray what kind of
children will women bear when they don't want them?"

"Well, Jane, your question would stagger me, if I did not know that
Nature often skips a generation, and produces some older and finer
type."

"Highly civilized men don't want children. Lady Harlow told me so,
John."

"Well then, Jane, highly civilized men are in no danger. They need not
fear what women can do to them. They will only find women pleasant to
meet and easy to leave. I saw many, many women in the London parks and
shopping district so perverted as to be on friendly terms with dogs, and
in their homes, with cats and cockatoos, and who had no affection for
children--women who could try to understand the screams of a parrot, the
barking of a dog, but who would not tolerate the lovely patois of the
nursery. Jane, the salvation of society depends on good mothers, and if
women decline to be mothers at all, it is a shameful and dangerous
situation."

"Oh, no! Why should I, for instance, undertake the reformation of
society? I wish rather to educate and reform myself."

"All right! No education is too wide or too high for a mother. She has
to educate heroes, saints, and good workers. There would have been no
Gracchi, if there had been no Cornelia; no Samuel, if Hannah had not
trained him. The profession of motherhood is woman's great natural
office; no others can be named with it. The family must be put before
everything else as a principle."

"John," she said coaxingly, "you are so far behind the times. The idea
of 'home' is growing antiquated, and the institution of the family is
passing out of dat