The price of every beauty in this world is in proportion to its quality, even although the payment of the price exacted may be long deferred or may be made in such an intricate and remote form that its connection with the result is overlooked. As the greatest thing which lovers can give each other is a child, and as none in the world are so great as lovers, the price exacted by Nature for the child of loving and sensitive people is correspondingly heavy. This statement may apparently conflict with the idea that the joy of bearing a child to the beloved is a woman’s consummation of happiness; yet it does not conflict, because of the deeper truth that the supremest happiness is mysteriously intermingled with self-sacrifice. A young woman whose character is sufficiently beautiful and sensitive to know the highest joys of motherhood--the full delights of human existence and love--will also be sensitive to the varied pains which motherhood will bring. Indeed, in this respect, the poet’s saying that “the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be pricked by the thorn” is essentially true. The radiance of the highest form of motherhood is that of the transfigured saint, hallowed by suffering comprehended and endured, transmuted into a service beyond and above the lower desires of self. For long, indeed for the many millions of years during which she has shown a motherhood comparable with that of human beings,[2] Nature has essentially trapped and tricked the mother into her motherhood. All the woodland and jungle creatures, the deer or the tiger, the rabbit or the squirrel, grow up through their brief adolescence into a partial consciousness of delight in themselves and reach the phase of their development in which their own desires urge them to unite with each other. One can scarcely believe that they are conscious of the resulting parenthood which will become a physical fact at a later date, although the training of her cubs by a woodland mother undoubtedly does include handing on, through some speechless communication, of some actual instruction. A similar blind parenthood, but in addition _coerced_, has for many thousands of years been characteristic of a large portion of the human race. Even to-day motherhood is too often blind: the young girl delighting in herself and the fairness of her own body, conscious of the power she wields in social life as a beautiful and attractive creature whom older people pet and please and young men place upon a pedestal, is urged by this natural self-centred delight into accepting through flattery the enjoyment of herself by some chosen mate; and the later consequences of motherhood are then faced either in amazed astonishment or in open revolt. [2] By this I mean the motherhood which carries and protects the developed young within the mother’s body, unlike that of the lower animals, such as fishes, which leave the eggs to their fate.