University of Virginia Library

Every sound in the large and lovely room was muffled by the rich rugs, the silk-hung walls, the heavy curtains. A fire burnt low on the hearth and sent a ruby shadow here and there, flickering over the alabaster vase, the ivory carving, the water-color on the panel, the blue silk coverlet and the billowy lace about the bed. The room was full of the fragrance of a hundred roses. An attendant, velvet-shod, carried away a small gold tray with a bowl of china as translucent as a flower; another nurse sat by the fire and dreamed over the pillow that lay across her knee. All seemed well with the young mother; all seemed well with the child.

She rested deep among her pillows, in a sleepy content; but quite determined on no more experience of this sort. Why could not the race have been continued in some other way? It really seemed as if there were some malevolence toward women. How much she had missed since they forbade her to dance or to ride. The idea of her foregoing all her pleasures for this—and life so short at the best! She would be on a horse again the moment she was able, before the frosty weather was all gone. She had lost the Hunt Ball, as it was. Well, here was the heir, anyway; and he would have to do.

A gush of music came through an opening door or window, a thrill of violins and flutes; there was a small and early german in the next house—how vexatious to be here! And all the rehearsals for the theatricals were over without her; and every one had declared there could never be such a Cleopatra as she; and she had ropes and ropes of pearls to wear, and miles of rose-colored gauzes half to hide and half to reveal the rose-colored tights. Very likely there would have been a fuss; but what was the use of being beautiful all to yourself? At all events, the gauzes would do for the skirt-dances they were going to give for the Blenheim Spaniel Hospital.

There would be some cotillions, anyway, before Lent. She hoped she wasn't going to come out of all this with her color gone. And her figure—it would be a pity if the gowns that had just come from Paris shouldn't fit her now. She would have the boxes opened to-morrow and the gowns spread out for inspection—one of them ought to be simply exquisite—cherry-colored satin, the front embroidered with seed-pearls, cut very low, but with a high ruff, and clouds of old Venice point. Lester van Dycke always said when she wore that shade that Watteau should have painted her. Poor Lester—she couldn't understand why there should have been any feeling about that little flirtation; he was only teaching her how to smoke a cigarette like Carmen. And then it was diverting to see just how far you could go and

stop. And really she had been awfully hard up when he lost that money to her at poker. Thank goodness, it was all paid back before he was sent off on that whaling voyage to break up his drinking. How people do slip in and out of your life.—What was that woman doing now? Oh, indeed—they needn't bring that baby to her; she didn't want him.

The nurse, a wise woman as nurses were in the days of Pharaoh, turned down the silken sheet and laid on the mother's arm the bundle of soft wool and filmy lace, baring the little pink face. "I never supposed babies looked like that. Isn't he comical? And you needn't think I'm going to nurse him," she meant to say aloud, but really said only to herself. "He can be brought up by hand; or you may get all the foster-mothers you please. I won't be tied down by a chain two or three hours long, and grow a fright into the bargain!"

"We can't let the little man starve," the nurse was saying. "At any rate, just for the present," she urged. "Till the doctor comes again and we can get just what is wanted."

Were all nurses like this? Wasn't she compelling? A sort of civilized She. Well, if she must. But not to keep it up. How absurd! How perfectly ridiculous! But they were not to think she was going on with it and forego the races and the yachting and everything else. "Don't you know," she said in her thoughts to the baby, "that you're dreadfully in my way?"

The baby smiled—the vacuous little grimace of a baby—and opened his eyes. "Dear me," she said. "How interesting! Do you imagine he sees me? Fancy! And look at the fingers—aren't they quite perfect? And his eyes—why, they're really—just look at the little fine corners! Do you suppose he knows I'm his mother? Oh, I am his mother!" And the little head had snuggled into place. She gazed at him in a bewildered wonder: something seemed to be taking hold of her very heart-strings. Oh, this scrap of a creature was part of her life itself! She had made him! She had struck this spark of a soul into a being! The idea! But why? The dear person had a soul, of course. And she fell to wondering what kind of soul it was. What kind of a soul—why, didn't people say the son was the avatar of the mother? A soul like hers, to be sure. My gracious, what kind of a soul was hers?

It seemed suddenly to be growing black everywhere about her, whether owing to the new sensations and to exhaustion, or to the too illuminating thought. All along the dusky wall she saw written in letters of flame, Mene, mene, tekel upharsin. She half laughed to think it should be in plain, every-day characters instead of Persian script. Thou art weighed in the balance—and found wanting.

What did it mean? What was weighed? What was found wanting? And what was this blackness? Was she fainting? Or, oh, was she dying!

Heavens! Was this dying? Was she sinking, failing, letting go of life? Don't let her die! Oh, don't let her die! She didn't want to leave all these pleasant things. She was afraid. For, oh, she was not fit to die! She must have made some exclamation, for the nurse was sprinkling her face. "It is all right," the woman was saying. "She is coming to. It's not unusual." Yes; it was no longer black about her: she was in the middle of a great light; she seemed to be withering in it, like a leaf in the fire. In the middle of the great light she saw herself for what she was. In that unknown and vast beyond, her little worthless soul would be lost. That was the kind of soul she had—a little, worthless, paltering one.

That was the kind of soul, then, she had given to her boy. He was to grow up in this great moving world as trifling, as light-minded, as slight as she, she who cared only for the pleasures that waste the body and starve the soul! His little velvet cheek lay on her breast—oh, how dear he was; how sweet he was, the little new person! And she had made him as useless, as light as a bubble. She recalled a deceit she had practised just before his birth—a scandal she had stimulated; the case that had been laid before her of bringing out a poor man's family for just the money that would buy the emerald cross she wanted, and she had taken refuge behind the immigration laws, and there were the emeralds in her jewel-case; her face burnt to remember

the champagne she drank the night she first wore those emeralds—heaven knows what silly things she said! Yes, yes; there was no help for it, this son of hers would want ease, glitter, wine, bibelots! Pleasures that had been follies in her would be follies in him, too, and worse than follies. Her frivolity would be in him effeminacy, her idleness would have made him a voluptuary. He would know nothing and care less for the sin and sorrow on his right hand and his left; he would not waste an hour of his laughing life on any of the grief and pain that made discord in the music. A silken sybarite, he would yield to every temptation; every gaiety would allure him. The thrones of the world might rock, he would not know it if his clubs were sound. His ambitions would be in his clothes, in his horses. He would have no strength to fight the forces of evil—he would be a part of them. Insufficient, of no purpose in the great scheme of the growth of the race—oh, was she thinking of her boy, her little son, the dear new, tender life? And then again that sinking, that slipping into outer darkness.

No, no, she must overcome it; she must not die; there was something for her to do; she could not afford to die! She could not have him, when his time came, go out into the dark the trumpery thing she was herself, as he needs must if she did not live to hinder it. He would be without strength to resist the press of evil, for she had given him no strength; he would be without impulse to do good, for she had given him no impulse; he would be without value in the scales of the universe, for she had given him no value. She must live to lead him past the temptation, for she would recognize it; to bid him to see the pitfall; to find, herself, and show to him, the shining mark beyond; to help him in all those straits and perils where being her son, he must otherwise be helpless. That other woman whom the doctor was to bring, that foster-mother, she must go away again. They should give her something for her own baby; but she could not have this one. She might be a better woman; he might draw force and will from her; but from his own mother he would draw love, and the love should keep him safe.

The fire fell, and all was still in the room. The nurse drowsed in her chair. The very roses seemed to hush themselves in dropping now and then a petal lest they wake the mother and the child from their deep, sweet, regenerating sleep.