In this unselfish distress, which is primarily for him, she is tempted to conceal her effort and tends to overstrain herself in an endeavour to act as completely as she can the part, as reported, of the early Greek or Roman matron or of the proud and savage mother who could bear her children as lightly as a woodland creature. Finding sooner or later that she _cannot_ do so, she suddenly gives in. Her strength, undermined by the series of distresses, the subtle shocks and blows to which she is secretly subjected, she yields and takes on that air of semi-invalidism, demanding constant care and consideration from her husband and those about her, which in a way represents the hauling down of her gallant flag. Her dreams of an easy motherhood are vanquished. She will at times be dimly conscious that she is no longer able to feel so acutely. This, in a way perhaps, is Nature’s provision against the too intense experiencing of emotion, which would otherwise come with sensitive motherhood. The sensation can be described, as one woman put it, as though each one of her powers of feeling were wrapped round in cotton wool, deadened and clogged so that they no longer gave contact. This may be well, but it adds in a dim way to the various distresses, a sense of unreality and apartness, which, if it coincides with that temporary antipathy to her husband, which was noted on page 33, may make the mother-to-be, for the time at any rate, indeed a wanderer in the valley of the shadow. CHAPTER VII The Young Father-to-be: His Amazements Till from some wonder of new woods and streams He woke, and wondered more; for there she lay. D. G. ROSSETTI. The young father-to-be, though a real and very important person, has been curiously neglected by all and sundry who concern themselves with the affairs of the “expectant mother,” “child welfare,” and the other social and semi-eugenic matters about which well-meaning people have so voluminously written and so sedulously talked.