"Then nature will provide its workers from one unfailing source--from those we have always with us, the poor and the despised. And it can be depended on with equal certainty to cast the satisfied, cultivated, and intellectual drones into outer darkness."
"My dear, but the doctor is savage, isn't he?" Lottie Nelson made the appeal indolently to Imogene. "We shall soon be asking, doctor," she concluded languidly, "which tribe you belong to."
"He would answer, the medical tribe," suggested Fritzie.
"Speaking of savages," interposed Arthur De Castro, "Charles and I were making a portage once on the York River. On the trail I met two superb little Canadian lads--straight, swarthy, handsome fellows. They couldn't speak English. 'You must be French,' I suggested, addressing the elder by way of compliment in that tongue. Imagine my surprise when he answered with perfect composure, 'Non, monsieur. Nous sommes des sauvages!'"
"For my part," said Imogene, "I am always glad to hear Doctor Bryson defend families and motherhood. I don't care how savage he gets."
"I defend motherhood because to me it is the highest state of womanhood. Merely as an instinct, its mysteries are a never-ending marvel."
Lottie Nelson looked patiently bored. "Oh, tell us about them, do, doctor."
"I will tell you of one," returned Bryson undismayed. "Take the young mother that brings her first child into the world; from the day of its birth until the day of that mother's death, her child is never wholly out of her thought. The child may die, may be forgotten by every one else on earth, may be to all other conscious existence in this world as a thing that never was. But in its mother's heart it never dies. I call that a mystery."
The doctor's glance as he finished fell on Alice's face. He was sorry at once that he had spoken at all. Her eyes were fixed on him with a look of acute pain.
Alice hardly knew Doctor Bryson, but what he saw in the sadness of her face he quite understood. And though they had never met, other than in a formal way, he never afterward felt that they were wholly strangers.