Hubert's or mine?"

"But you are a mother."

Hadria laughed. "You play into my hands, Henriette. You tacitly
acknowledge that it was not for _my_ gratification that those children
were brought into the world (a common story, let me observe), and then
you remind me that I am a mother! Your mentor must indeed be slumbering.
You are simply scathing--on my behalf! Have you come all the way from
England for this?"

"You _won't_ understand. I mean that motherhood has duties. You can't
deny that."

"I can and I do."

Miss Temperley stared. "You will find no human being to agree with you,"
she said at length.

"That does not alter my opinion."

"Oh, Hadria, explain yourself! You utter paradoxes. I want to understand
your point of view."

"It is simple enough. I deny that motherhood has duties except when it
is absolutely free, absolutely uninfluenced by the pressure of opinion,
or by any of the innumerable tyrannies that most children have now to
thank for their existence."

Miss Temperley shook her head. "I don't see that any 'tyranny,' as you
call it, exonerates a mother from her duty to her child."

"There we differ. Motherhood, in our present social state, is the sign
and seal as well as the means and method of a woman's bondage. It forges
chains of her own flesh and blood; it weaves cords of her own love and
instinct. She agonizes, and the fruit of her agony is not even legally
hers. Name me a position more abject! A woman with a child in her arms
is, to me, the symbol of an abasement, an indignity, more complete, more
disfiguring and terrible, than any form of humiliation that the world
has ever seen."

"You must be mad!" exclaimed Miss Temperley. "That symbol has stood to
the world for all that is sweetest and holiest."

"I know it has! So profound has been our humiliation!"

"I don't know what to say to anyone so wrong-headed and so twisted in
sentiment."

Hadria smiled thoughtfully.

"While I am about it, I may as well finish this disclosure of feeling,
which, again I warn you, is _not_ peculiar to myself, however you may
lay that flattering unction to your soul. I have seen and heard of many
a saddening evidence of our sex's slavery since I came to this terrible
and wonderful city: the crude, obvious buying and selling that we all
shudder at; but hideous as it is, to me it is far less awful than this
other respectable form of degradation that everyone glows and smirks
over."

Miss Temperley clas