She continued to love her doll, not that she disliked cats and dogs and birds, only that the doll, the simulacrum of the future child, touched her to her innermost fibres. She had the brother-cult, yet she loved no one, except her father, so much as the absurdly big French doll, the last of a long line dating back to her babyhood, that slept with her every night. The old folks were at first amused, then edified by this stubborn reaction to a profound instinct. In time they became accustomed to seeing a staring wax effigy on the pillow of their daughter's couch, attired in a neat nightdress and lace cap. Ah, well! had said the father, it is a premonitory symptom, yet she is happier now, dear child, than she will be with her future husband. Considering her self-effacing nature, the reply of his wife was rather tart: "If you read less Schopenhauer you wouldn't be so prejudiced against my sex. To hear you talk one might suppose that your married life had been a vale of tears." To which the old man humbly and affectionately replied: "Instead of a bed of roses, as it is," and surprised his spouse by warmly kissing her. They didn't forbid Mona the company of young men but she made no attempt to meet anyone. Her brother was away most of the time at the seminary and his friends were theological students, neuter persons she evaded rather than despised. Voluntary eunuchs, enemies of the very source of life, she felt uncomfortable in their presence, as she would have been embarrassed if a hermaphrodite had been pointed out to her. The unnatural was merely a mediaeval idea, but the anti-natural was to be feared and avoided. She did not say this to her brother, who in her eyes was a saint, but she said as much to her father who sympathised with her. Another confusion in her mind was the degrading of the major instinct of life--after hunger; Reproduction. If, as the Bible says, fornication is a rank sin, why do a few words mumbled over a man and woman by a clergyman or magistrate make it less a sin? It's the same vile act isn't it, even in marriage? Her mother was more shocked at her expression than at the idea which prompted it--an idea as old as the hills. "But Mona, people don't think such things, much less speak them." "They do mother. There isn't a girl in the world who hasn't had this same thought, though she may keep it in the secret cabinet of her mind." Her mother shook her head but didn't dare speak of sin, or redemption or the holy sacrament of matrimony instituted by the Church to bless the most animal of the functions, to lend it dignity, to create a safeguard for the children, not to mention the fact that this sacrament screens the shock and doubts and hesitations of pure-minded girls, to whom physical union with a man would be otherwise repulsive. No, this "theological bric-à-brac" as Mr. Milton called the tenets of religion, his wife had been forbidden to speak of to her children.