"Now I shall tell you something strange. I do not pretend to understand it; I may have my theory, but that is of no physiological value,--I only tell it to you. Well, all the time she was carrying the elf she was full of simmering hatred, and she wished me evil often enough; one feels those things in an odd way. Why did she? Oh, that--that was a family affair, with perhaps a thread of jealousy mixed up in the knot. Well, one day the climax came, and much was said; and I went away and married, and got ill, and the doctors said I would be childless. And in the mean time the little human soul--I thought about it so often--had fought its way out of the darkness. We childless women weave more fancies into the 'mithering o' bairns' than the actual mothers themselves; the poetry of it is not spoiled by nettle-rash or chin-cough any more than our figures. I am a writer by profession--oh, you knew! No, hardly celebrated; but I put my little chips into the great mosaic as best I can. Positions are reversed; they often are now-a-days. My husband stays at home, and grows good things to eat and pretty things to look at, and I go out and win bread and butter. It is a matter not of who has most brains, but whose brains are most salable. Fit in with the housekeeping? Oh, yes. I have a treasure, too, in Belinda. She is one of those women who must have something to love. She used to love cats, birds, dogs, anything. She is one bump of philo-progenitiveness; but she hates men. She says: 'If one could only have a child, ma'm, without a husband or the disgrace! ugh, the disgusting men!' Do you know, I think that is not an uncommon feeling among a certain number of women. I have often drawn her out on the subject; it struck me, because I have often found it in other women. I have known many, particularly older women, who would give anything in God's world to have a child of 'their own' if it could be got, just as Belinda says, 'without the horrid man or the shame.' It seems congenital with some women to have deeply rooted in their innermost nature a smoldering enmity--ay, sometimes a physical disgust--to men. It is a kind of kin feeling to the race-dislike of white men to black. Perhaps it explains why woman, where her own feelings are not concerned, will always make common cause with woman against man. I have often thought about it. You should hear Belinda's 'serve him right' when some fellow comes to grief! I have a little of it myself [meditatively], but in a broader way, you know. I like to cut them out in their own province.