"I want a child. As soon as I am with child, they will drive me away from here. I need a child, since the first one died. I want to give birth to another, and this time I will not let them take it away from me, nor let them rob my soul. I beg pity and help from you. You, who are good, aid me with your strength, help me get back that which was taken from me. Believe me, in Christ's name, I am a mother, not a loose woman. I do not want to sin, but I want a child. It is not pleasure I seek, but motherhood." I was in a dream. I believed her. It was impossible not to believe when a woman stood on her rights and called a stranger to her, and said openly to him: "They have forbidden me to create man. Help me." I thought of my mother, whom I had never known. Perhaps it was in this same way that she threw her strength into the power of my father. I embraced her and said: "Pardon me. I have judged you wrongly. Forgive me in the name of the Mother of God." While lost in self-forgetfulness in accomplishing the holy sacrament of marriage, an impious doubt arose in my mind. "Perhaps she is deceiving me, and I am not the first man with whom she is playing this game." Then she told me her life story. Her father was a locksmith and her uncle was a machinist's apprentice. Her uncle drank and was cruel. In summer he worked on steamboats, in 'winter on docks. She had nowhere to live, for her father and mother were drowned while there was a fire on a boat, and she became an orphan at thirteen. At seventeen she became the mother of a child by a young nobleman. Her low voice flowed through my soul, her warm arms were around my neck, and her head rested on my shoulder. I listened to her, but the serpent of doubt gnawed at my heart. We have forgotten that it was a woman who gave birth to Christ and followed him humbly to Golgotha. We have forgotten that it was woman who was mother of all the saints and of all the heroes of the past. We have forgotten the value of woman in our vile lust and have degraded her for our pleasure and turned her into a household drudge. And that is why she no longer gives birth to saviors of life, but only bare, mutilated children, the fruit of our own weakness. She told me about the monastery. She was not the only one who was sent in there by force. Suddenly she said to me, caressingly: "I have a good friend here, a pure girl, from a rich family. And, oh, if you would only know how difficult it is for her to live here. Perhaps you could make her with child also. Then they would drive her forth from here and she would go to her godmother." "Good God!" I thought, "another one in misery!" And again my faith in the omniscience of God and the righteousness of his laws was broken into. How could one place man in misery that laws might triumph? Christa whispered low in my ear: "If only you could help her also!"