It had taken a hundred million years to make little Asher, but he was essentially an accident. The chemistry that produced him could roughly be understood by anybody. Positive and negative electricity had blocked each other and turned into a planet. If the blocking had been perfect, it would have produced a planet of bismuth, the heaviest element that does not disintegrate. But the actual earth was not even lead or gold or tungsten or iodine. It was mostly iron, a comparatively light stuff, and shaded off on the surface in ever lighter elements—calcium, potassium, chlorine, sulphur, phosphorus, magnesium, sodium, fluorine, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, hydrogen. All these occurred in a baby, and a baby was an occurrence of these. These were the stuff of rock and air and water. The lightnings tore nitrogen out of the air, the rains washed it down upon the rock, the moistened rock absorbed the sun, and presently there was a baby. Of course she could make it seem less precipitate by taking into account the hundred million years of evolution, but what do they amount to in the life of stars? A baby is something too unadvised, too sudden, too like the lightning which doth cease ere one can say it lightens. It quivers on the planet and presently acts like lightning. It wants to go as fast as possible and feel the thrill in every nerve. It wants to drink fire out of a glass, and dance all night. It wants to ride wild horses and the wild winds. It wants to fight and be praised for fighting. It wants to kiss and clasp and separate without much responsibility. What is more, it manages to do these things. The old folks, she reasoned, call it immoral because they are past such achievement, or perhaps because some inarticulate instinct warns them that there is not food enough to support so much combustion, but the actual life of nature’s darlings is electric and irresponsible. She felt a good deal of sympathy for the sinners. She had not been called the humming-bird for nothing. She was American, as all humming-birds are, and had small use for the languors of Africa or India. By the same token she loved a humming motor and a humming picture-show. Marvin was doubtless having oceans of fun in making fuels that would render all sorts of humming possible. He was working, she thought, in carbon compounds, and though she knew little about such matters, she knew something. Carbon compounds, such for instance as the alcohols and atropine and quinine, were very different from such horrible things as lead. She knew too that decent girls in every civilized country are getting acquainted with them for a certain reason. And the reason was that a country like Holland, with a population of five hundred human beings to the square mile, was simply obliged to control its birth-rate. All the world would have to come to that point of view within a century. By closing their eyes to the flashing facts, good people were simply driving the young to vice.