“My dear father,” came the reply, “for thirty years you have been paid for teaching people that the only safety of our little existence here on earth lies in love. I can imagine nothing more awful and disappointing than for a woman to go through the process of childbirth without being in love. It is dreadful enough to live from moment to moment without being in love, but to pass through a great natural crisis without it would be devastating. If she weren’t in love with me I couldn’t have touched her heart. I could only have appealed to her intelligence, which would have been quite useless. It seemed to me vitally important that she should be made happy, so that through happiness she could understand and feel she was doing no injury to any one, but was performing the ultimate service which a woman is privileged to perform for only a few human beings, namely, the gift of life. She has understood and felt that.”
“But she is in love with you!”
“Why this terror of love? Love, like everything else, becomes a bad thing if it is used selfishly. I ask nothing of her. She knows that. She will love her child the more because of her love for me, and by her greater love she will win the love of the child. . . .”
“But . . .” said Francis.
“What now?”
Francis made full and frank confession of how he had come with a desire to make the young woman understand and feel her sinfulness. Serge pressed his arm affectionately.
“My dear father,” he said, “a flower may be impregnated by a very disreputable bee, but it remains a beautiful flower for all that.”
“A flower,” said Francis, “has no soul.”
“In the presence of love,” replied Serge, “argument is quite futile. The tragedy of the world, it seems to me, is this, that with such a power of love and friendship and affection as is in us, there should be so little of them.”
“I at least have won a little of them to-day,” said Francis, and timidly with his arm he pressed Serge’s hand.