like it. Most of those
Madonnas over on the other side in all the galleries suggest her.
Well,--her parents were furious,--wouldn't hear of it,--you know Shakers
think marriage and love and all those things are wicked. And she thought
so, too. How she used to suffer! It wore her to a shadow. She wouldn't
marry me,--wouldn't let me so much as touch her hand. But we used to
meet and--then she caught a cold--waiting hours for me, one winter
night, when there'd been a misunderstanding about the place--I was in
one place, she in another. And the cold,--you see, she couldn't fight
against it. And--and--there won't be another, Harvey. All women are
sacred to me for her sake, but I couldn't any more marry than I
could--could stop feeling her sitting beside me, just a little way off,
wrapped in her drab shawl, with her face--like a glimpse through the
gates of Heaven."

Within me up-started the memories that I kept battened down.

"Your children are mine, too, Harvey," he ended.

I took from Carlotta's work-basket an unfinished bit of baby clothing. I
went to him and held it up and pointed to the monogram she had
embroidered on it.

"E. R. S.," he read aloud. Then he looked at me with a queer expression
beginning to form in his eyes.

"Edward Ramsay Sayler, if it's a boy," said I. "Edwina Ramsay Sayler, if
it's a girl."

He snatched the bit of linen from me and buried his face in it.

The baby was a boy,--fortunately, for I don't admire the name Edwina,
and I shouldn't have liked to handicap a child with it. Carlotta and Ed
were delighted, but I felt a momentary keen disappointment. I had wanted
a girl. Girls never leave their parents completely, as boys do. Also I
should rather have looked forward to my child's having a sheltered life,
one in which the fine and beautiful ideals do not have to be molded into
the gross, ugly forms of the practical. I may say, in passing, that I
deplore the entrance of women into the world of struggle. Women are the
natural and only custodians of the ideals. We men are compelled to
wander, often to wander far, from the ideal. Unless our women remain
aloof from action, how are the ideals to be preserved? Man for action;
woman to purify man, when he returns stained with the blood and sin of
battle.

But--with the birth of the first child I began to appreciate how
profoundly right my mother had been about marriage and its source of
happiness. There are other flowers than the rose,--other f