"The people that you follow--they admit the race lives for the child, that the mother must risk her life to give it life. Then, they seem to think, the sacrifice can cease. But if you know about homes, you know better. As she gives her body to be the matrix of another body, so she must give her spirit to make a shelter that shall be the matrix of another spirit. If she refuses to do this, she fails, and all her labor is in vain. It is very simple. As I see the world, the mothers must die daily all their lives. There is no other way. It is a part of life, just as bearing and birth are parts of life. No one denies that they are hard--hard--hard. But that is the glory of it! Nothing is worth while that lacks the {206} labor and the danger, the pain and the difficulty!" For once in her life Clarissa was speechless. Words would not come. The inherited weapon of her own fluency had been turned against herself. For as other women had been shaken from their old faiths and allegiances by Clarissa's gift of tongues, even so had she been shaken by her child. The girl's young cogency had struck her dumb. In the long minutes of silence that followed, Clarissa was, perhaps, more truly a mother than she had been since Marvel first lay in the circle of her arm. She saw a daughter's point of view at last. She knew which proclaimed the deeper doctrine, which was the truer prophet of humanity, her child or she. Yet when she spoke at last, it was {207} not to discourse of Humanity. Humanity was forgotten; she and her child were all. Her lips shaped, unbidden, that old, old demand of the hungry heart. "Marvel--don't you _love_ me at all?" Marvel hesitated. Her air of detachment was complete. "You never tried to make me love you, mother. Even love goes by a kind of logic. Domestic life gives you one kind of reward; public life another kind. You get the kind you choose, I take it, and no other. If you want love, you must choose the love-bringing kind," said this austere young judge. "And I've found out another thing by myself. You love ten times as much when you have served with hands and feet as well as brain. I do not know why. I only know you do. {208} If--if I love you at all, mother, it is because of the work I have done for you here--in making it like home!" Clarissa bowed her head on her hands, in a bitterness made absolute. This child of hers was her own child. What right, indeed, had she to expect self-sacrifice, tenderness, cherishing, from the flesh of her flesh? That which she had given was rendered unto her again in overflowing measure, and beholding she saw that it was just.