And she told herself that he was right. Never had there been a better husband. And to be loved by a man like that, a man clean and fine and kind; to be the mother of such a man's child, she was very certain was worth more to a woman than any other honors or fulfillments which life could bring her. She had known that always, even when she first discovered--so bitterly!--that Ted was not in sympathy with her gift and her ambitions; and she knew it more surely as time went on. There were moments when she wished ardently that the sympathy between them had been more absolute; when she thought that, happy as she was, she would have been happier if their tastes had gone hand-in-hand like their hearts. But there was never a time when she would have exchanged Ted for any other man, or when she felt it possible to have done without him. There are women who, married, feed their discontents with visions of what life could have been in freedom or with some other man than they have chosen. Sheila was not of this sort. Having crossed the threshold of marriage, she did not look behind her at the alluring--and elusive--road of might-have-been. She hoped, now, for other children. With this utter surrender of herself to the woman's life, there came to her the longing for many children, for all her arms could hold. The sum of that creative force which, under different circumstances, would have flowed into her work, all its denied passion and vitality, was transmuted into the instinct of motherhood. Because of her creative gift, there was literally more life within her, more life to bestow, and so, the channel of artistic expression being closed to her, she yearned to spend it all upon maternity; to have, indeed, as many children as her arms could hold. Had these desired children come to her, peace might have been hers finally and entirely. But the desire was not granted. Eric grew out of his babyhood to a fine, sturdy boyhood, and was still the only child. And now Sheila, a woman of thirty and ten years married, began to feel again, and more strongly than ever in her life, the urge of her gift, the unrest of dreams stifled, thwarted, but never destroyed. She had made a compact with God, and she continued to keep it; but more and more hunger stared out of her eyes and a nervous restlessness betrayed itself in her manner. She was happy, but she was not satisfied. Something clamored in her unappeased. If she had lived in a large city, there would at least have been food, if not activity, for that clamoring, aching thing within her. There would have been pictures and music and plays to lift her, at times, into the world of poetic beauty for which she longed. But Shadyville could offer nothing to one of her mental quality; as a girl she had found diversion in its social gaiety, but as a matron, the mother of a nine-year-old son, even the social life of the town was restricted for her to card-parties and the doubtful amusement of chaperonage.