--I can kiss you now--Baby! little sister!--we wait together for him who is coming back. --Coming at last. For the first time coming. There was a holy man. He released us, stripped us naked to ourselves. And because of a holy man, we can wait real now, sure, intact, so gently wait and so long, for a man who is coming. --We need not ask who he is. He is ours. He will find us and love us, won’t he, little sister?... and leave us no more. --Like you! O my blessed baby--like you whom I was strong enough to bear, not strong enough till now to look upon--like you he is ours. --O the black night into which you were born, my child. O the long pain you stood upon: it rose like a flame from my womb you stood upon ... up, up throughout you, to your eyes and fingers. O the black night of fiery pain you were, with your sucking mouth upon my naked flesh.... We dawn together, Love, into a sleep where with eyes open Cooly we walk toward Day. Fanny held her child and again she looked unwilted into sun. It was to her as if she gazed on a bright field, and there above flowers, under a sky, stood a woman sheer with a child in her arms. Her feet in grass were cool. Her hair in sky was cool. She was sheer, cool ... unburned by the fires of birth. She was born ... washed clean of the bloods of birth and born. Very cool, very sheer. So Fanny saw herself. ... Saw certain things making her sunny field of the world--as the light of her vision lay clarified in context of green thrusts running, forms sprayed and ashift over earth. She had long talks holding her child in her arms.... “I must be more to him when he comes back than I was ever! I can be more! “I accept you, Harry. I have no pride, I am humble. I challenge drink, gaming, women. I am ashamed no longer. I shall beat them. I shall crowd them out. I shall be for you what they lied seeming they could be for you. You will find me everywhere, meet me nowhere. No obstruction. You will find me risen in a great pride, in a great strength, now that my pride is gone and I have lain, prostrate naked, sucking the strength of a stranger.” --O stranger! not a thought more for you. Not a thought. That is as you will. Harry, he made me love you. She went into her room, stripped her clothes from her shoulders. She looked in a glass at her nakedness, feeling under her eyes her shoulders gleam like cool flames upward. It was strange: her shoulders were untouched, her breasts had not fallen.--I am whole! Come, Harry, take me. There had been a wind, there had been a bath for her naked shoulders. She was naked, flushed by a swift wind ... gone ... cleansed by a running water ... run away.--I am whole, I am born. Will you come, Harry, so you can see the woman who has been born?