I dwell upon this and one other incident which I shall relate in its proper place, as all that was offered to me of the traditional compensation for what women are supposed to be. If a sedulous social ideal has kept them from the world touch through knowledge and achievement, it has been because, sincerely enough, they have not been supposed to be prevented from world processes so much as directed to find them in a happier way. This would be reasonable if they found them. What society fails to understand, or dishonestly fails to admit, is that marriage as an act is not invariably the stroke that ushers in the experience of being married. Whatever proportions the change in my life had assumed to the outward eye, it was only by the imagined pain of loss that I began to perceive that I could never be quite in the same relation to things again, and to identify my experience with the world adventure. I had become, by the way of giving life and losing it, a link in the chain that leads from dark to dark; I had touched for the moment a reality from which the process of self-realization could be measured. It was the most and the best I was to know of the incident called maternity, that whether it were most bitter or most sweet it was irrevocable. I suppose, though he was always so inarticulate, that Tommy must have caught something of my mood from me. He didn't seem to see anything ridiculous in my holding on to a fold of the baby's skirt all the way home; and when we had come into the house and the boy was laid in his crib again, so wan and so little, I sat on my young husband's knee and cried with my face against his, and he did not ask me what it was about. I think, though, that we had not yet appreciated how near we were to losing him until my mother came to visit us along in the middle of the summer. She was quite excited, as she walked up from the station with Tommy, and for her, almost gay with the novelty of spending a month with a married daughter, and then as soon as she had sight of the child, I saw her checked and startled inquiry travel from me to Tommy and back to the child's meagre little features, and a new and amazing tenderness in all her manner to me. That night after I was in bed she came in her night-dress and kissed me without saying anything, and I was too surprised to make any motion of response. That was the first time I remember my mother having kissed me on anything less than an official occasion ... but she had buried five herself.