"I deny that, Jane. The large majority of
women, I am sure, when they marry do not hold themselves outraged and degraded by the consequences, nor do they consider natural functions less honorable than social ones. Money can release a woman from work, but it cannot release her from any service of love."
"Men forget very easily the physical sufferings of wives. I love our little Martha as well as, perhaps better than, you do, but I remember clearly that for nearly a whole year I endured the solitude, sickness, and acute suffering of maternity. And whatever else you do, you will never persuade me to like having children. And pray what kind of children will women bear when they don't want them?"
"Well, Jane, your question would stagger me, if I did not know that Nature often skips a generation, and produces some older and finer type."
"Highly civilized men don't want children. Lady Harlow told me so, John."
"Well then, Jane, highly civilized men are in no danger. They need not fear what women can do to them. They will only find women pleasant to meet and easy to leave. I saw many, many women in the London parks and shopping district so perverted as to be on friendly terms with dogs, and in their homes, with cats and cockatoos, and who had no affection for children—women who could try to understand the screams of a parrot, the barking of a dog, but who would not tolerate the lovely patois of the nursery. Jane, the salvation of society de
pends on good mothers, and if women decline to be mothers at all, it is a shameful and dangerous situation."
"Oh, no! Why should I, for instance, undertake the reformation of society? I wish rather to educate and reform myself."
"All right! No education is too wide or too high for a mother. She has to educate heroes, saints, and good workers. There would have been no Gracchi, if there had been no Cornelia; no Samuel, if Hannah had not trained him. The profession of motherhood is woman's great natural office; no others can be named with it. The family must be put before everything else as a principle."
"John," she said coaxingly, "you are so far behind the times. The idea of 'home' is growing antiquated, and the institution of the family is passing out of date, my dear."