“... My mother did not ask but once. When I told her--the horror came to me that she would die. I had not thought of it before. I had thought that it was mine--had seen very little of Paul. In fact, he had come several times, when I would not see him.... She called my father--and it was all to be enacted again. For a moment, I thought he would strike me. The most dreadful thing to them all was that I was not ashamed. They felt that I was unnatural.... “There was one high day in that little upper room. It was all like a prayer, when they would suffer me to be alone and not wring me with their misery--but this one high day, I must tell you. I stood by the window in the watery light of the sun from the far north. That moment the Strange Courage came. I felt that I could lead a nation, not to war, but to enduring peace; as if I had a message for all my people, and a courage not of woman’s, to tell it, to tell it again and again--until all the people answered. It was then that I understood that a man’s soul had come to my baby, and that it was not to be a girl, as I had sometimes thought. “And then the rest of the waiting--days of misery that I can hardly remember the changes of--yet something singing within me--I holding it high toward heaven as I could--singing with the song within. After weeks, it suddenly came to me what they wanted to do to hide their shame--to take the little child half-finished from me--to murder it--to hide their shame. “Then I told them that it had not occurred to me to marry Paul--that I did not love him--that I had loved the little child. I told them that I did not believe in the world--that I did not believe I had done wrong--that I did not believe our old preacher who stayed so long at the table could make me more ready for the child. I told my father that I did not believe in marrying a man and saying that I would have no children for three years. I told him that I was mad for the child--that I was young and strong and ready to die for it ... that my baby wanted me, and no other. I would have gone away, but they would not let me do that. They kept me in an upper room. Paul had gone away ... and after months my father went to find him. It was sad to me--sadness that I cannot forget in that--my father taking his cane and his bag and setting out to find the father--heart-broken and full of the awfulness of being away from his home. He had not been away for years.... And my mother coming timidly to my room.... And then I went down like Pharaoh’s daughter to the very edge of the water--for, for the Gleam!” Her eyes were shining and she laughed a little, looking upward as if she saw a vision of it, and had forgotten the room and the listening--her eyes as close to tears as laughter.