“That day on the balcony when he was destroying the rosebud, his mother’s spirit touched mine (as mine now touches yours), and she urged me (as I am now urging you) to bring this child out of his state of arrested development into harmony with righteousness. She informed me that in the bonds of matrimony, as well as out, Bertha, mothers often endure abuse which no creature but man thrusts on his mate; abuse which devitalizes and poisons the fountain at which, born and unborn, the babe is fed; and which weakens the nerve substance of the child, by draining the vital forces of the mother, in a way more ruinous than would be a sword-thrust. “This mother with spiritual insistence urged me to keep her son in the body, and to carry him through this valley of the shadow of death, so as to enable him to attain a resurrection to newness of life in this body.” Bertha’s eyes were raised in soul-flaming sympathy with the sufferings hinted at. Such violence had been done her. For years she had been hurled into wraths and torments, and into the dangers of that moral defeat from which she had been delivered by Ethel’s comprehension of her inward righteousness, as opposed to the outward conditions that had been thrust upon her, and as opposed to the reputation which she had unjustly been made to bear. And of all this she thought. But Ethel’s stated recognition of the _commonness_ of the outrages put on woman as maid and mother, now aroused her intelligence as to the _general_ need for a general enlightenment. But her wrath was inexpressible, and she cried out suddenly: “O, but he is a fool, that Reginald! If he had treated me well I could have done him great good. I hate him! I wish he would cease to live in any world,—could be blasted, blotted out of all worlds, and made into nothing at all, with a lasting ache of shame to it! For he is a fool. Miss Ethelbert, it’s—it’s him! That’s who it was!” And she covered her face, stretched and distorted with loathing, and whispered dreadfully: “Let him die as the fool dies; withhold your breath of life from him. Dead he would be but for the vitality you exhale upon the upper realms of his being. Let him die! Let him be damned, as he has damned my poor Waldemar into being! I do hate, hate fools!” Just so had Mrs. Mancredo said: “I do—dislike sick men.”