“They talk about hostages to fortune,” she had expressed her idea, “they talk about a man with young children as having given hostages to fortune. You know, it’s quite absurd. He doesn’t. I don’t say a man to whom the support of children is a financial anxiety hasn’t, by begetting them, placed himself in a position of captivity to fortune, or to the future, or whatever you like to call it. He very much has. He’s backed a bill that any day may fall due and find him without means to meet it; he’s let himself in for blackmail, always over him a threat. But I’m talking about men above the struggle line. They don’t, in their children, give hostages. It’s the woman does that. Men don’t give nor forfeit anything. It’s the woman gives and forfeits. Why, when his friends meet a man who was last met a bachelor a couple or three years ago, what change do they see in him? They don’t see any change at all. There isn’t any change to see. He has to tell them; and he always tells them rather sheepishly or rather boisterously. ‘I’m married, you know,’ he says. ‘Yes, rather. Man alive, I’ve got two kids!’ The other says, ‘My aunt!’--more probably he says ‘My God!’--‘My God, fancy you!’ And they both laugh--laugh! “Hostages to fortune! To a man and amongst men it’s just a joke. It’s no joke to a woman. Do you suppose a married girl, meeting old friends, has to tell them she’s a mother, or, if she had to tell them, would tell them like that? Can’t they see it at a glance? Isn’t she changed? Isn’t she, subtly perhaps, but unmistakably, altogether different from the unfettered thing she used to be? Of course she is. How otherwise? She’s given hostages to fortune and she’s paying; she’s being bled. She’s giving up things, she’s not going out so much, she’s not reading so much, she’s not playing so much, she’s not interested so much in what used to interest her. How can she? There’s the children. How can she? She’s given hostages to fortune. Oh, happy is the man that hath children for they are as arrows in the quiver of a giant. But it’s the woman is the arrowbearer! It’s the woman pays.” Lo, there had come to this intolerance the longing--“Here!”--that Anna’s bosom had, the urge to hold a tiny scrap against her breast, to have her heart, bursting for such release, torn out by baby fingers. It had o’erborne the other. She had thrown herself upon its flood; not yielded to it as one drawn in by rising waters, but tempestuously engulfed by it and borne away upon it as swallowed up and borne away in Harry’s arms when “Rosalie! Rosalie!” he had cried to her. That which the subsidence revealed, adoringly she called her Huggo.