A great deal of necessary information had come my way through Pauline's marriage, through the comment set free by Belle Endsleigh's affair, through the natural awakening of my mind toward the intimations of books. Marriage I began to perceive as an engulfing personal experience. Until now I hadn't been able to think of it except as a means of providing pleasant companionship on the way toward that large and shining world for which I felt myself forever and unassailably fit. It began to exhibit now, through vistas that allured, the aspect of a vast inhuman grin. Somewhere out of this prospect of sympathy and understanding, arose upon you the tremendous inundation of Life. Dimly beyond the point of Tommy's joyous possession of me, I was aware of an incalculable force by which the whole province of my being was assailed, very different from the girlish prevision of motherhood which had floated with the fragrance of orris root from Aunt Alice's bureau drawer in the Allingham's spare room. I don't say this is the way all girls feel about the approach of maternity, but I saw it then like the wolf in the fairy tale, which as soon as its head was admitted, thrust in a shoulder and so came bodily into the room and devoured the protestant. Long afterward, when I was in a position to know something of the private experience of trapeze performers, I learned that they came to a point sometimes in mid-spring when the body apprised them of inadequacy, a warning sure to be followed in no long time by disaster. I have thought sometimes that what reached me then was the advice of a body instinctively aware of being unequal to the demands about to be imposed upon it. I hardly know now by what road I arrived at the certainty that some women, Pauline for instance, were able to face this looming terror of childbearing by making terms with it. Life, it appeared, waited at their doors with respect, modified the edge of its inevitableness to their convenience. If Pauline had been accessible--but she was living in Chicago with Henry Mills, going out a great deal, and writing me infrequent letters of bright complacency. It was only in the last frightened gasp I fixed upon my mother. You must imagine for yourself from what you know of nice girls thirty years ago, how inarticulate the whole business was; the most I can do is to have you understand my desperate need to know, to interpose between marriage and maternity never so slight an interval in which to collect myself and leave off shrinking.