“I remember one supper; the countryman talked--talked of the marriage day--the breakfast, the ceremony--the end and the dusk, and turned to Lois with sleepy half-folded eyes. She was smiling and flushed--and I looked from face to face at the table, at my sisters--and I rushed away because I could find nothing pure.... Some one said my mother never looked prettier.... I remember the flood of honeysuckle perfume that came to me in the torture of hatred, as I passed through the distant hall.... And then later from the top of the stairs, Lois and my mother were talking, and Lois said: “‘You know, Mother, we will not have children for the first three years, at least----’” “I was somehow below by her in the lower hall. She seemed a rosy pig upstanding, marked red and flaming.... And that night long afterward, my mother found me and said, ‘You are getting beyond me, Olga.’ ... But I could only think of men and women copying the squirrels, filling their bins, dressing their door-yards, reaching for outer things--and it was back of my very being--back of the mother and the patriarch--back of the shepherding and the folding--back of _me_. I hated life with destroying hatred--Lois wanting the seasons, but unwilling to bring forth fruit, accepting the countryman’s idea of life.... Can you see that it had the look of death to me?” Bellair could only bow his head. To him the woman was revealing the grim days through which she had won her poise and power.... She was telling another incident with the same inclination--for the thought of being a mother had been the one master of her days. He seemed to see the child, the girl, the younger woman about her--a grey-eyed, red-lipped girl, with a waist that was smaller and smaller as she gained in inches from fifteen to eighteen--madness for mothering, passionate in that, but not passionate for sensation--her face sometimes so white, that they would ask her mother, “Is Olga quite well?”... Yet teeming with that intensive health that goes with small bones and perfect assimilation--that finds all to sustain life in fruit and leaves ... books, light sleeping, impassioned with the lives of great women and the saints--one of those who come to the world for devotion and austerity and instant sacrifice; yet for none of these apart; rather a fruitful vine, her prevailing and perennial passion for motherhood. “And yet I almost ceased to breathe,” she was saying, “when I came to understand man’s part in these things. I felt _myself_ differently after that--even children--but from this early crisis which so many men and women have met with untellable suffering, emerged a calm that could not have come without it. The travail brought me deep into the truth. For all great things the price must be paid--how wonderfully we learned that in the open boat. There are sordid processes in the production of all fine things--even in the bringing forth of a Messiah.”