For a good many years John Webster and his wife had not been very intimate. Long ago, when he had found himself married to her he had found also that she had a theory of life, picked up somewhere, perhaps from her parents, perhaps just absorbed out of the general atmosphere of fear in which so many modern women live and breathe, clutched at, as it were, and used as a weapon against too close contact with another. She thought, or believed she thought, that even in marriage a man and woman should not be lovers except for the purpose of bringing children into the world. The belief threw a sort of heavy air of responsibility about the matter of love-making. One does not go very freely in and out of the body of another when the going in and out involves such heavy responsibility. The doors of the body become rusty and creak. “Well, you see,” John Webster, in later years, sometimes explained, “one is quite seriously at the business of bringing another human into the world. Here is the Puritan in full flower. The night has come. From the gardens back of men’s houses comes the scent of flowers. Little hushed noises arise followed by silences. The flowers in their gardens have known an ecstasy unfettered by any awareness of responsibility, but man is something else. For ages he has been taking himself with extraordinary seriousness. The race, you see, must be perpetuated. It must be improved. There is in this affair something of obligation to God and to one’s fellow men. Even when, after long preparation, talk, prayer, and the acquiring of a little wisdom, a kind of abandon is acquired, as one would acquire a new language, one has still achieved something quite foreign to the flowers, the trees, and the life and the carrying on of life among what is called the lower animals.” As for the earnest God-fearing people, among whom John Webster and his wife then lived and as one of whom they had for so many years counted themselves, the chances are no such thing as ecstasy is ever acquired at all. There is instead, for the most part, a kind of cold sensuality tempered by an itching conscience. That life can perpetuate itself at all in such an atmosphere is one of the wonders of the world and proves, as nothing else could, the cold determination of nature not to be defeated.