Not long after my sister’s first child came (several years later than the foregoing incident) I dreamed of being back home, and that a neighbour boy, running through our yard, in reply to some remark which, on waking, I could not remember, called out derisively, “Genie’s baby! you mean Kate’s--who ever heard of Genie’s baby!” (Dream analysts would find in this a good example of wish-fulfilment.) That dream marked an epoch in my woman’s life. I realized then and there, how acutely only a childless woman can know, that I should never be a mother. Till then I had given the subject but little thought. Occupied with my work, and having known from girlhood that I should not marry, yet the knowledge of this other thing came to me like a stab--never a baby of my own! And then I knew that, fill my life with whatever work and interest I might, nothing could compensate for missing this supreme joy. The positive notions I held as to heredity, the traits and diseases in my kindred which I took so seriously, the disagreeable and morbid tendencies I noted in myself, had, as I have intimated, all combined to make me feel it would be wrong for me to marry. I used to argue with myself: “A man that I could esteem and love would be so far above me that he could never stoop to love me; if he did, he would not be the hero I thought him; and if I _were_ to marry, and bring into the world children like myself, it would be a calamity indeed.” No, I would stop the perpetuation of beings like myself. It was a blind kind of altruism that actuated me, and not till I had the dream just mentioned did the personal side of the question occur to me; and then I learned how, as an individual, I should suffer in abiding by the stand I had taken. A lover at this time would probably have swept away all my fine theories and resolutions; but I had none, and serious work and interests were filling my days. But how illogical I was! It seemed never to occur to me that the same conditions that debarred me from marriage should debar my sister also; I was even anxious for her to marry, while so firmly convinced that it would be wrong for me. I evidently thought that all the seeds of disease and crankiness were in me alone and that I must let them die out.