, will bear children even when
she does not feel the active wish to bear them. She will bear them
just because the authoritative expectation is that she _shall_ bear
them.

But Marie was free!

She was free from the requirement of an heir for the family estate.
The modern form of property, requiring no male warrior for its
defense in the next generation, had done that for her.

She was free from the dictates of historic Christianity about conjugal
duty and unrestricted reproduction. Modern Protestantism had done that
for her.

She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband's
will. Modern individualism had done that for her.

She was free! Uncoerced by family authority, uncoerced by ecclesiastical
authority, uncoerced by marital authority, she was almost limitlessly
free!

There being no _external force_ compelling her to bear children, she
had to follow _internal instinct_.

That instinct, if it had existed in her, would have been a sufficient
guide. It would have been a commanding guide. It would have been the
best possible guide. Rising in her from the original eternal
life-power it would have driven her to child-bearing more surely than
she could have been driven to it by any external agency whatsoever.

But the instinct toward child-bearing could not now be revived in
Marie. With the cessation from struggle and from effort and from
fatigue and from discipline and from the sorrow of pain that brings
the joy of accomplishment, with that cessation the instinct toward
child-bearing had reached cessation, too. With the petrifaction of its
soil it had withered away.

Nobody had ever tried to bring Marie back to the soil of struggle.
Nobody,--not her father, not her mother, not her husband, not one of
her friends, not one of her teachers had ever taught her to return to
life by returning to labor.

The greatest wrong possible to a woman had been wrought upon her.

She had been sedulously trained out of the life of the race into
race-death.

Yet when it got talked around among her friends that she didn't want
children, people blamed her and said it was very surprising, _in view
of all that had been done for her_.

V.

Mothers of the World

Leaning over a tiled parapet, we looked down at the streak of street
so far below. Motor-cars, crawling--crawling, glossy-backed beetles.
"Drop a pin and impale that green one." One couldn't, from up there,
give motor-car and motor-car owne