“Oh, my modesty is lost to me--my unoffending form is become a shame to me!” She moaned and muttered in her pain, and dropped her head, saying, “I am degraded--I have fallen, oh, so low, and I shall never rise again.” Adam’s eyes were fixed upon her in a dreamy amazement, for he could not understand what had happened, it being outside his world as yet, and her words having no meaning for one void of the Moral Sense. And now his wonder grew: for, unknown to Eve, her hundred years rose upon her, and faded the heaven of her eyes and the tints of her young flesh, and touched her hair with gray, and traced faint sprays of wrinkles about her mouth and eyes, and shrunk her form, and dulled the satin luster of her skin. All this the fair boy saw: then loyally and bravely he took the apple and tasted it, saying nothing. The change came upon him also. Then he gathered boughs for both and clothed their nakedness, and they turned and went their way, hand in hand and bent with age, and so passed from sight. EVE SPEAKS I They drove us from the Garden with their swords of flame, the fierce cherubim. And what had we done? We meant no harm. We were ignorant, and did as any other children might do. We could not know it was wrong to disobey the command, for the words were strange to us and we did not understand them. We did not know right from wrong--how should we know? We could not, without the Moral Sense; it was not possible. If we had been given the Moral Sense first--ah, that would have been fairer, that would have been kinder; then we should be to blame if we disobeyed. But to say to us poor ignorant children words which we could not understand, and then punish us because we did not do as we were told--ah, how can that be justified? We knew no more then than this littlest child of mine knows now, with its four years--oh, not so much, I think. Would I say to it, “If thou touchest this bread I will overwhelm thee with unimaginable disaster, even to the dissolution of thy corporeal elements,” and when it took the bread and smiled up in my face, thinking no harm, as not understanding those strange words, would I take advantage of its innocence and strike it down with the mother hand it trusted? Whoso knoweth the mother heart, let him judge if it would do that thing. Adam says my brain is turned by my troubles and that I am become wicked. I am as I am; I did not make myself.