Pictures of the child in after life filling brightly and beautifully some big position in the world may flit past the mother’s mind during this time, but, if the mother is wise, she will not too intimately visualize the outward form of her child as a maturing girl or boy. By so doing she may indirectly wrong it. (See Chapter XIV). Her delight should be to picture a tiny laughing messenger from God, thinly veiled so that its sex is hidden; the figure of a child a few years old, still full of divine innocence and radiant possibilities. Happy hours of bodily rest may be spent picturing it in a thousand beautiful actions dancing in the sunlight, a contagious centre of joy in the whole world around them. On such an idea of delight she may lavish every day invigorating thoughts and wonderful dreams; none will be wasted, of that she may be assured. If, at the same time, she is securing the coming child’s bodily well-being through the proper material channels, then she can feel that these dreams of higher than material beauty are being built into reality. The secret sacred wonder of the process of which she is the active centre casts its spell of magic and delight around the willing mother. “A Garden enclosed is my Beloved,” and she feels within her own existence the mystic sense of divine beauty, which one feels in another form in a walled garden in the summer twilight. CHAPTER VI The Young Mother-to-be: Her Distresses The amount of suffering that has been and is borne by women is utterly beyond imagination. HERBERT SPENCER: _Principles of Ethics_, II. The bodily changes which at first almost imperceptibly steal upon the mother, if she be a girl who has enjoyed her own physical beauty, and has taken that care of herself which so delightful a thing as a young woman’s body merits, will be at first a series of amazements and perhaps of delights as her body rounds itself and becomes more perfect. At this time the husband should fill his memory with her exquisiteness, for though she will, in the end, return perhaps to her normal strength and a re-awakened and different beauty, she will never again in her life reach such a point of bodily perfection as she does during the first three months or so of her coming motherhood, culminating at about the close of the third month. As the years pass, hallowed and sanctified by love which is understood, even when grey with age, her face may gain an ever increasing beauty and power, but the perfection of her body is reached in the early days when she is first about to become a mother.