A day will come when, for the first time, the father-to-be may lay his hand upon his wife below her waist and feel the sturdy little kicks of his future son or daughter, and can know that, though hidden from him, still there is beside him a vital and independent being whom he has wakened to life. The presence of this little creature whom he has not seen colours and permeates every hour of their joint existence, and links the family in an extraordinary unity, the full significance of which I will consider in Chapter XII. When the later months pass, the father-to-be will have lost one of his most exquisite memories if he has not already talked and laughed with his future child, and if he and his wife and child together have not united in that most mystical union possible to human flesh. CHAPTER IX The Young Father-to-be: His Distresses When one knows thee, then alien there is none, then no door is shut. Oh, grant me my prayer that I may never lose the bliss of the touch of the one in the play of the many. TAGORE: _Gitanjali_. With all the passion for children, with the protective chivalrous feeling towards his wife which a well born and well knit man instinctively feels, through all the joy of fatherhood that is coming and the delight in its accomplishment, there must run a thread of intense distress at his own helplessness to help. With every consideration that the most resourceful man can think of towards his wife, with every helpful, tender, encouraging, supporting thing that he can do, how little is his share during all these months in the burden of the coming parenthood. If, through sympathy, he feels each pang his wife may feel; if, through sympathy, he curtails his activity to rest with her, nevertheless it is a voluntary abnegation, and if it became intolerable at any moment he could escape; he could run over the hills; he could go for a day’s fierce solitude and activity wherever his feet desired to lead him; but he knows that his wife _cannot_, that she is chained, that not for a moment of the day or night for nine months can she lay down the burden for a brief rest--that there is no exit for her from this imprisonment of so many of her potentialities but through the gateway of agonizing pain.