When August came and she knew that any day might bring the test, she felt her courage ebbing just a little. As a panting man longs for more alkali in his blood, so she longed for new courage.
She fancied ways out. Suppose she fled from her lover and hid herself in a city. But that would leave her father alone, a desertion not to be thought of. Suppose she carried her father off and earned a living for them both. But that would break his heart. Suppose she lied to Marvin and said that she had ceased to love him. But she really did not know how to lie.
She turned back to history and harrowed her soul with horrors. She reminded herself that excess of population has driven every race to expose its children. She saw Sicilian graveyards opened and hundreds of babies that had been buried alive in earthen pots. She saw the silver sails of Athens unloading excess of life on every island, and the rock called Tyre unloading its slums on Africa. She saw Europe unloading itself on America. She even hunted up in Plato and Aristotle the passages in which both those noble writers sanction abortion for the good of the state.
Chapter 88. Radium
But in spite of it all, her sense of pity seemed to be going. When the twenty-third came, and she read that another gallant young leader had been assassinated, she could not mourn him deeply. Though nothing could be stupider than to slay Michael Collins, his earth went on shining in the grave. She could not bring herself to assert that such a youth ought never to have been born.
She had read a great deal in the papers about radio-telegraphy. Apparently the year 1922 would be remembered as the year when all the boys in America began to talk through empty space like gossiping seraphs. She wished that Horatio could have lived to see the day. How tickled she would have been to hear from Washington such words as these: “Get ready! Your brother Horatio is on the ether.” If all the boys in the world got acquainted with each other by such means, maybe peace would come after all—some day.
Occasionally she had seen some reference to the deeper mystery of radium and its terrible, almost inconceivable energy. She earnestly hoped that nobody on earth was trying to find anything like it but greater in quantity. Given such a power, the savage human race would destroy itself in a year.
Chapter 89. Actinium
As she had no notion of Marvin’s being engaged in virtually that search, her will to refuse him continued to lose weight by fits and starts, like actinium.
On the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-seventh, she restlessly rowed round into the creek after white lilies. She gathered a score. Then, as she leaned from the dory and dipped her arm into the brown water, she caught sight of a speck of green gelatin on the stem of a lily, and lifted it in.