"You have enough work as it is," he persisted, but without firmness, and his eyes flickered away from mine. I laughed a little. He turned to me a face so distressed that my smile died suddenly. "Oh, don't laugh!" he said, painfully in earnest. "You must keep in mind what you are to me. I--cannot be different. I am sorry." I gave up my harmless young pupil and said nothing more. From that moment I began to form my entire code of conduct where men were concerned on a rigidly impersonal and formal basis. It was not difficult, for my first and only affection was centred in my husband, and the impulse to coquetry was foreign to my nature. My husband's determination to leave my individuality untrammelled was sometimes overborne, in small ways that delighted me, by his innate sense of fitness. We played tennis and he played excellently. One day, as we left the courts, he said to me, "Tennis just isn't your game, Margaret. Your dignity is always getting in the way of your drive. I don't want you to give up your dignity--it is too much a part of you. But you might leave tennis alone and try archery. I am sure that is more suited to your type." The amused obedience with which I took his suggestion soon became enthusiasm for the new sport. To me, marriage had always seemed the most mystic and important of human relations, involving at times all the rest--and particularly parenthood. I am a born mother, to whom the idea of marriage without children is unthinkable. Since I put away my dolls, dream children had taken their place in the background of my fancy. I saw them vaguely at first, but with the coming of love I knew quite clearly how they would look. Now that I had married Chan-King, I should have liked a child at once as a surer bond between us and a source of comfort for myself while he would be making his start in China. I knew that he loved children, for on several occasions I had deliberately put a tiny neighbour in his way and had taken note of his warm friendliness and gentleness with the wee thing. But, fearing that he would be unwilling to accept a new responsibility while our affairs were still unsettled, I put aside my desire for a child, though my loved books were growing strangely irksome. I did not know that my husband shared the usual foreign belief that the American woman is an unwilling mother. Then one day he went to call on a friend of his, a Chinese student whose wife and little son were with him. "I saw the Chinese baby," he told me with boyish eagerness. "He is going to have a little brother soon. Lucky baby!"