Houses, sky, the shuttling tissue of men and women past me are the dark wall and dark blood of a womb. I airless and immobile within it, still believe in Birth. Doctor Stein ... the revered Doctor Stein, whose interest in me at the laboratory has so warmed my heart, is coming down my steps. I am beyond surprise. Within this mothering darkness of my life words and customs and conventions move quite nimbly. So I greet Doctor Stein. I observe how his gentle face is a bit clumsied by his embarrassment: “I just thought I’d drop in. I knew, though I’d said ‘Come,’ you were not coming to see me.” “Doctor Stein, I didn’t dare.... I was afraid you’d forgotten that casual invitation.” “Just so. So _I_ came.” “Won’t you come back, Doctor Stein?” He followed me docilely, and took the chair I pointed out for him, sprawling a bit with his legs out, priming his pipe, and his eyes puzzled at the curtains over my book shelves. “You cover your books, when you need to think deep?” he asked. “This time I did. I never have before.” He puffed hard at his pipe, clenching the bowl in his fist. A naïf discomfort faintly fretted his natural ease. His fine mouth moved, his gray thick brows lowered over his eyes, and in his eyes there was a twinkle as if this was a holiday for him, and he a bit rusty at it. “Oh,” I exclaimed, as the man’s playful candor shone to me not at war but at one with his limpid mind. “Oh, I am so glad, so glad that you cared to drop in!” “I’ve been getting up courage to come, for a long time.” He puffed. I felt no guilt as he watched me. Let this spirit which had pierced to the soul of matter and proved its mastery by the act of birth ... let him see me clear, as he saw everything. He was above judging, he was a creator! If I was this horrible enigma from which the mankind in me shrank and for which it had no word, let him see: he who had captured in a formula the passion of gestation, would know, if he saw me clear, some law to hold me, some law to put me back into the warmth of human life. So I faced his eyes with open eyes. And I basked in his intelligence, as in a sun.