"Understand, before you start reading this, that you need not answer it unless you wish. I will wait a while, and then take silence for your answer if that is how it must be. I had almost accepted silence already, or thought I had, most of the time this last month. But I saw you yesterday--might have stayed away, meant to, could not--with all the fog of company manners between us, and discovered what I should have known: I am not cured of you. I wish I were, and I shall be after a while. I've wished I could hate or despise you--can't do that, but I'll be able to forget you sometime, and if there's no happiness at least there will be peace, of one sort or another. "I have gone by two periods, Jimmy. In those good days of June--yes, they were good--we evidently managed to start a certain arrogant little Blake-Doherty thing which now lives in me as if he belonged there. And he does. What does this knowledge do to you? Sorry? Scared? Maybe a little bit happy, or proud? Or just angry with me? I'm shocked to realize I don't know you well enough to guess the answer. "One thing I will not do--and your religion would approve my decision, I believe (at the same time that it provides some cruel obstacles in the way of carrying it out). I will not, Jimmy--I will _not_ creep off on the wrong side of our idiot laws and have an abortion. I want this child. Crazy of me it may be, but I already love it, while it's just a blob of almost-nothing that'll soon be making me sick and physically scared. I want it. "And I want the child to have a father. From the start. I've seen too much of petticoat government--it reeks. I don't trust my own self to bring up a child alone. In spite of all the best knowledge I have, sooner or later I'd have some damned uprush of maternity to the brain and start making a lot of the mistakes all mothers make--including some my own mother made with me, no doubt--and nobody to check me, nobody to fill the father's place that must not be empty if a child is to grow up straight and good. I won't have my baby crippled that way. "He's yours too, Jimmy. It's your seed in me, the life-package from all your grandfathers and grandmothers. He's from Ireland, dear, he's from Italy where my father's mother was born, he's from one of the embraces when your sweet strong body could not free itself until I was willing to let you go. I frightened you sometimes, didn't I? I will again, or at least I dream of it.