Heaven was pleased that a wife should multiply her kind. What else was she for? If Heaven subtracted, that was the pleasure of Heaven. The orders were to bear much fruit. Families of sixteen or more children were not unusual, and a dozen was hardly more than normal. Most of the family would soon be found in the graveyard, but that had always been so. The death rate among mothers was horrible, too; but they died in the line of duty and their husbands remembered them tenderly—unless their successors were over-jealous. And it was a man’s duty to keep on taking wives so that the race should not perish—as it was a soldier’s duty, as soon as one charger died under him, to capture another. Patty grew almost blasphemous over the curse upon her sex. She resented her seizure by one of the wandering souls, and the long exile it meant from “the pursuit of happiness.” She called it “unconstitutional!” When the day of travail came she screamed like a tormented child, and when her hard-won puppet was taken from her she wept like a little girl whose toy is wrested away. Those weird deaths of souls hardly yet born were devastating to RoBards. He frightened Patty so by the first hideous sob she heard from him that he concealed his grief from her and sought only to console her as if he had lost nothing. It cost him heavily to deny himself the relief of outcry. On one subject at least he and Patty did not disagree. She would not have her lost babies taken to either of the graveyards at White Plains and Armonk. She asked to have their hardly tenanted bodies kept on the farm, and chose for them a nook where a covey of young tulip trees had gathered like a little outpost of sentinels. Always she vowed that she would have no more children: it hurt too much to see them die. And RoBards, though he longed for a forest of sons about him, felt a justice in her claim that she should have the decision since she carried the burden. But she was so tempting and so temptable that now and again passion blinded them again to peril, and she was trapped anew. Sometimes, in his black agonies of mourning, RoBards believed that these children were snatched from them because they were conceived in tempests of rapture, and not in the mood of prayer and consecration with which the preacher, Dr. Chirnside, declared the parental altar should be approached. But Patty mocked RoBards’s solemnity when he broached the subject, and giggled at him as she peeked between her fingers and snickered, “Shame on you!” She had two weapons that always put him to utter rout—a naughty smile of pretended shock, and the quivering upper lip and tremulous wet eyelids of being about to cry.