"That's by with forever, Jock; I shall never write again," she answered.
"No more verse-making?" I inquired.
"Never any more—unless it be to say to women this."
She stood, with her hands folded before her, a beautiful fulfilled Nancy, looking down at us with sweetest earnestness, her children leaning against her as she spoke.
"I should write: I, Nancy Stair-Carmichael, have learned that verse-making and verse-singing and the publicity that goes with them do not make me a finer woman; I have learned that my woman's body is not strong enough for the mental excitement of that existence, and to be a daughter, a wife and a mother, as well, and that God in his goodness sent a certain great poet into my life to show me that gift is nothing beside womanhood.
"And I would reason with all these dear other women like this:
"Suppose I write certain verses! Where will my lines be two hundred years from now? Forgotten words of unimmediate things. But suppose my heart spoke to me, and knowing I could do but one work well, I put all childish ambition aside to become the mother of men, that centuries from now thousands of my children may be fighting for the right of present issues and hastening that Divine Outcome for which God made us all.
"And I would say to them: the night I knew another woman was to be the mother——" she paused abruptly, for she had been so carried away by her own thought as to forget where this might lead. She was a great woman, but to the end of her life could never bring herself to name the fact that Danvers had had another wife.
"That night," she continued, slurring the statement over, "I learned more about life than the classics ever taught me.
"And I would write, as well, something about the trial, to say to them that when Danvers's life was at stake I had no thought but to save him. Right or wrong, innocent or guilty, the only thing I wanted was that he might be free.