sadness or weakness, and ugliness she dare
not resist. Her nature leaps to be the comforter. It is her reason. It
exalts her to an ecstasy wherein nothing but the sacrifice of herself
has any proportion. Men are not fathers by instinct but by chance, but
women are mothers beyond thought, beyond instinct which is the father
of thought. Motherliness, pity, self-sacrifice--these are the charges
of her primal cell, and not even the discovery that men are comedians,
liars, and egotists will wean her from this. As she looked at the pathos
of his face she repudiated the hideousness of his body. The beast
which is in all men is glossed by women; it is his childishness, the
destructive energy inseparable from youth and high spirits, and it is
always forgiven by women, often forgotten, sometimes, and not rarely,
cherished and fostered.

After a few moments of this silence he placed the reed to his lips and
played a plaintive little air, and then he spoke to her in a strange
voice, coming like a wind from distant places.

"What is your name, Shepherd Girl?" said he.

"Caitilin, Ingin Ni Murrachu," she whispered.

"Daughter of Murrachu," said he, "I have come from a far place where
there are high hills. The men and maidens who follow their flocks in
that place know me and love me for I am the Master of the Shepherds.
They sing and dance and are glad when I come to them in the sunlight;
but in this country no people have done any reverence to me. The
shepherds fly away when they hear my pipes in the pastures; the maidens
scream in fear when I dance to them in the meadows. I am very lonely in
this strange country. You also, although you danced to the music of my
pipes, have covered your face against me and made no reverence."

"I will do whatever you say if it is right," said she.

"You must not do anything because it is right, but because it is your
wish. Right is a word and Wrong is a word, but the sun shines in the
morning and the dew falls in the dusk without thinking of these words
which have no meaning. The bee flies to the flower and the seed goes
abroad and is happy. Is that right, Shepherd Girl?--it is wrong also.
I come to you because the bee goes to the flower--it is wrong! If I did
not come to you to whom would I go? There is no right and no wrong but
only the will of the gods."

"I am afraid of you," said the girl.

"You fear me because my legs are shaggy like the legs of a goat. Look at
them well, O Maiden, and