"It's not that," Rachael said, smiling over a little sense of pain, "but I--I like it. I want the boys to think that their mother goes to church and prays--and I really want to do it myself!" He smiled, as always a little intolerant of what sounded like sentiment. "Oh, come, my dear! Long before the boys are old enough to remember it you'll have given it up again!" "I hope not," Rachael said, sighing. "I wish I had never stopped. I wish I were one of these mild, nice, village women who put out clean stockings for the children every Saturday night, and clean shirts and ginghams, and lead them all into a pew Sunday morning, and teach them the Golden Rule, and to honor their father and their mother, and all the rest of it!" "And what do you think you would gain by that?" Warren asked. "Oh, I would gain--security," Rachael said vaguely, but with a suspicion of tears in her eyes. "I would have something to--to stand upon, to be guided by. There is a purity, an austerity, about that old church-going, loving-God-and-your-neighbor ideal. Truth and simplicity and integrity and uprightness--my old great-grandmother used to use those words, but one doesn't ever hear them any more! Everything's half black and half white nowadays; we're all as good or as bad as we happen to be born. There's no more discipline, no more self-denial, no more development of character! I want to--to hold on to something, now that forces I can't control are coming into my life." "What do you mean by forces you can't control?" he asked with a sort of annoyed interest. "Love, Warren," she answered quickly. "Love for you and the boys, and fear for you and the boys. Love always brings fear. And illness--I never thought of it before I was ill. And jealousy--" "What have you got to be jealous of?" he asked, somewhat gruffly, as she paused. "Your work," Rachael said simply; "everything that keeps you away from me!" "And you think going to Saint Luke's every Sunday morning at eleven o'clock, and listening to Billy Graves, will fix it all up?" he smiled not unkindly. But as she did not answer his smile, and as the tears he disliked came into her eyes, his tone changed. "Now I'll tell you what's the matter with you, my dear," he said with a brisk kindliness that cut her far more just then than severity would have done, "you're all wound up in self-analysis and psychologic self-consciousness, and you're spinning round and round in your own entity like a kitten chasing her tail. It's a perfectly recognizable phase of a sort of minor hysteria that often gets hold of women, and curiously enough, it usually comes about five or six years after marriage. We doctors meet it over and over again. 'But, Doctor, I'm so nervous and excited all the time, and I don't sleep! I worry so--and much as I love my husband, I just can't help worrying!'"