For several weeks after this she was nervous and unstrung. She grew hollow-eyed, the shadows deepened, and her sunniness of temper gave place to an unaccustomed melancholy. She had learned that a new life was quickening within her, and she experienced a blind and passionate fear of inevitable agony. She feared herself, she feared suffering, and she feared the fate of the unborn life. One evening she threw herself into Anthony's arms. "It is the inevitableness," she said. "If I knew that it might not happen, I could bear it better. But nothing can prevent it, and I am afraid--afraid." Algarcife grew white. "I am afraid for you," he answered. "And the child? We shall be responsible for it. The thought maddens me. We are so poor, and it seems to me that it is wrong. I feel as if I had committed a sin--as if I were forcing something into the world to fight with poverty and discomforts. It may even hate us for bringing it. I almost hope it will die." "We will make it a happy child." "But doesn't it frighten you?" Algarcife smiled. "Not as much as you do, you bodiless bit of eccentricity." "All the same, I feel as if it were a sin," said Mariana. "Mill says--" Anthony laughed aloud and caught her to him. "So you are turning my own weapons upon me," he said. "For the sake of domestic harmony, don't quote Mill to me, Mariana." CHAPTER XV In the autumn the child was born. Mariana, dissolved in nervous hysteria in the beginning, rallied when the time drew on, and faced the final throes triumphantly. For several months beforehand she sat and waited with desperate resignation. Her existence, hedged in by the four walls of her room and broken only by the strolls she took with Algarcife after night-fall, exasperated her resentment against social enactments, and she protested bitterly. "A woman is treated as if she were in disgrace," she said, "and forced to shun the light, when, in reality, she is sacrificing herself for the continuance of the race, and should be respected and allowed to go about in a right and natural manner. I believe all this indecency started with those old scriptural purifications, and I wish it hadn't." But when the days passed, her lamentations gave place to serenity of speech, and her expression became almost matronly. Dramatically she was stifling her aesthetic aversion and adjusting herself to her part. When it was over, and she lay still and etherealized among the pillows, she was conscious only of an infinite restfulness. It was as if the travail through which she had passed had purged her of all capacity for sensation, and the crying of the new-born child fell upon her ear like the breaking of faint and far-off waves of sound.