d with
the rights of the child, she would come round. He had pictured her
coming round. But now it seemed that he was not to plan their future on
his own terms. What he offered had not grown sweeter to her senses. No
gifts that he could devise would be anything but poor in the light of
the unkind past. And that light burned steadfastly still. She was not
changed. As he listened to her, it seemed that she was merely picking up
the threads where they were dropped. He feared that if he stopped much
longer beside her, she would come back to the old anger and wake into
the old wrath.

"I'd dearly hoped that you didn't feel like that, any more. You've got
right on your side up to a point, though human differences are so
involved that it very seldom happens you can get a clean cut between
right and wrong. However, the time is past for arguing about that,
Sabina. Granted you are right in your personal attitude, don't carry it
on into the next generation and assume I cannot even yet, after all
these years, be trusted to befriend my own child."

"He's only your child in nature. He's only your child because your
blood's in his veins. He's my child, not yours."

"But if I want to make him mine? If I want to lift him up and assure his
future? If I want to assume paternity--claim it, adopt him as my son--to
succeed me some day?"

"He must decide for himself whether that's the high-water mark for his
future life--to be your adopted son. We can't have it all our own way in
this world--not even you, I suppose. A child has to have a mother as
well as a father, and a mother's got her rights in her child. Even the
law allows that."

"Who'd deny them, Sabina? You're possessed, as you always were, with the
significance of legal marriage. You don't know that marriage is merely a
human contrivance and, nine times out of ten, an infernally clumsy
makeshift and a long-drawn pretence. Like every other human shift, it is
a thing that gets out-grown by the advance of humanity towards higher
ideals and cleaner liberties. We are approaching a time when the edifice
will be shaken to its mouldering foundations, and presently, while the
Church and the State are wrangling and quibbling, as they soon must be,
over the loathsome divorce laws, these mandarins will wake up to find
the marriage laws themselves are being threatened by a new generation
sick of the archaic tomfoolery that controls them. If you could only
take a larger view and not let your