uch. Both he and Archelaus had had Phoebe. That this spark of
life should have been from him or from Archelaus ... was that, after
all, so important? It seemed such a small share. Fatherhood, looked at
dispassionately, seemed to him a thing very artificial in its
convention. Life, that there should be life--yes, that was different,
but not that it should have been from him or another on that particular
occasion.... When one thought that both had equally possessed the woman
they seemed to merge so in her personality as to lose individual
personalities of their own.

If he had not kept away from Phoebe for those two months, thus, in the
light of her letter, putting the matter beyond doubt, how would any of
the three of them ever have known whose son Nicky was? Women always said
they knew, even when they were going equally with two men; but did they?
Was it not rather that they always decided it was the child of the man
they cared for most? And if conditions had all along been normal between
him and Phoebe, then how would he have felt in the light of his
brother's avowal? It would have been impossible to say whether the child
had been his or his brother's; and yet Nicky would have been himself,
even as he was now, and he, Ishmael, would have felt the same about him,
and nothing would have been really different any more than if he had
never known; or, knowing that there was doubt, still could not have told
for certain which of the two it was who had fathered Nicky. How, then,
was it different now that he did know beyond a doubt? Nicky was the
same....

Ishmael clung on to that. Nicky was the same. Then--and the light came
sliding into his heart with a sensation of easing--if Nicky were the
same, then the truth might be the same too; all that he had lived by not
be the more overset than was the Nicky he had known and loved all these
years. Though Nicky was not what was called his son, all he had built
upon Nicky might not be valueless any more than Nicky himself had become
valueless, or one jot of his character or personality been
overthrown.... Nicky stood where he had; then why not more than Nicky?
These were the eternal verities, not the mere accident of fatherhood.

Ishmael gave a long, tired sigh, and his body slipped a little down into
his chair; his eyes still stared at the light in the sky. He felt
suddenly terribly tired, so tired that his body grew very heavy and his
mind of a thistledown lightness, which refused