"Of course it is. I had a friend once who shone like a star in society. She married, and children as fast as she could. Well! what consequence? She lost her beauty, lost her spirit and animation, lost her youth, and lost her health. The only earthly things she can talk about are teething, dieting, and the measles!"
I laughed at this exaggeration, and looked round to see what Ernest thought of such talk. But he had disappeared.
"As you have spoken plainly to me, knowing, me, to be a wife and a mother, you must allow me to 'speak plainly in return," I began.
"Oh, speak plainly, by all means! I am quite sick and tired of having truth served up in pink cotton, and scented with lavender."
"Then you will permit me to say that when you speak contemptuously of the vocation of maternity, you dishonor, not only the mother who bore you, but the Lord Jesus Himself, who chose to be born of woman, and to be ministered unto by her through a helpless infancy."
Miss Clifford was a little startled.
"How terribly in earnest you are!" she said. "It is plain that to you, at any rate, life is indeed no humbug."
I thought of my dear ones, of Ernest, of my children, of mother, and of James, and I thought of my love to them and of theirs to me. And I thought of Him who alone gives reality to even such joys as these. My face must have been illuminated by the thought, for she dropped the bantering tone she had used hitherto, and asked, with real earnestness:
"What is it you know, and that I do not know, that makes you so satisfied, while I am so dissatisfied?"
I hesitated before I answered, feeling as I never felt before how ignorant, how unfit to lead others, I really am. Then I said: