easter," said Doctor Wilhelm, passing by beside the tall
figure of the first mate. "How would you like to come to my room? We can
smoke and have some coffee there without being disturbed."

XI

Walking along the deck below the promenade deck, one passed a covered
gangway on both the starboard and port sides, into which opened various
official rooms, including the officers' cabins, among them Doctor
Wilhelm's, a comparatively spacious room, containing a bed, a table,
chairs, and a well-equipped medicine closet.

The gentlemen had scarcely seated themselves when a Red Cross sister,
who worked under Doctor Wilhelm's direction, appeared and gave a report,
smiling as she did so, of a woman patient in the second cabin.

"In my two years of practice on a steamer, this is the fifth time I have
had a case like this," Doctor Wilhelm said after the sister had left.
"Girls who can no longer conceal the consequences of their mistake and
are at loss what to do, take passage on a ship, when it is almost certain
that the event they expect will occur. Such girls, of course, never
suspect that they are typical on all sea trips, and are surprised when
our stewards and stewardesses sometimes treat them with corresponding
respect. I myself, of course, always do all I can for the poor creatures,
and I usually succeed in inducing the captains not to make an
announcement of the birth, in case there is one. Once a girl about whom
we could not help giving notice was found hanging to the window sash in
her lodgings near the harbour."

Over their coffee and Simon Arzt cigarettes, the whole woman question was
unrolled.

"So far," said Frederick, "the woman question is nothing but the old-maid
question, at least in the way women conceive it. The sterility of old
maids sterilizes the whole movement."

Frederick developed his ideas. But tormenting visions of Mara and her
admirer pursued him, and he discoursed mechanically, his reasoning on the
woman question having become a matter of rote to him.

"The vital germinal spot of each reform in women's rights," he argued
with apparent liveliness, blowing clouds of smoke, "must be the maternal
instinct. The cells of the future cell-state, which will be a healthier
social body, is the woman with the maternal instinct. The great women
reformers are not those who would have women act just like men in all
externals, but those who are conscious that all men, even the greatest,
were born of women