.
Oh, dearest, I have more to bring you than I dared to believe!"

So her impetuous mind had run onward to meet happy possibilities when
Ted arrested it with the comment, "I don't care for that sort of woman
myself--at least for that sort of married woman!" And at the words,
Sheila's dreams had fallen, like broken-winged birds, to the ground.

For a moment--nay, through all the conversation that followed, a
conversation that revealed to her with cruel clarity a phase of her
husband's mind that she had not hitherto encountered--she was wondering
if those dreams would ever rise again. Rude and stupid blows from the
hand she loved best had struck them down. How could they recover
themselves? How could they sing and soar--those fragile, shattered
things?

But even as she glimpsed them thus, broken, defeated, there surged up
within her the strength of resistance. Sweetly compliant in all the
common affairs of her and Ted's joint life, she had, for this issue so
vital to her, an amazing obstinacy. Defeated? She and her dreams?
_No_! Her dreams were her own, born of her as surely as the children
of her body would be. They were hers to save--hers to realize. And
she was strong enough to do it!

That had been her thought when she withdrew herself from Ted's knee.
His whisper--"The greatest thing that can happen to a woman is
motherhood!"--had inspired no tenderness in her. For at that moment
there was astir within her, violent and dominant, the impulse that is
mightier than motherhood itself--the impulse of _creation_. And it was
none the less imperative because it demanded to mould with written
words rather than living flesh.

Ted's last gentle speech, his hurt expression when she turned coldly
from him, moved her not at all. For the time, he was not Ted, her
beloved, but Man, her enemy. True, she had not regarded man as an
enemy before. Peter, for instance, had been an ally without whom she
could not even have fared thus far. But Peter was not a husband; his
masculinity had not been appealed to--nor threatened. She saw now that
men would always fight for the mastery of their own women, would always
seek to impose sex upon them as a yoke.

Ah, that black, bitter gulf of sex!

Sheila, looking into it for the first time, shuddered with revolt and
rage. So _this_ was life; this the end of such moments as her
exquisite awakening to love. To _this_ the high and heavenly raptures
lured one at last! A bird