"Then you think, Margaret, that motherhood is going to be all that it's cracked up to be?"
"Under ideal conditions," said Margaret, "I can see nothing greater to be desired."
"But do the ideal conditions ever exist?"
"I suppose they seldom do."
"Sometimes I've had my doubts," said Catherine. "The male poets and painters exalt the beauty, the holiness of motherhood, and the women bear the burden and pain of it."
"But when women whose lives have had the largest horizon—women like Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Margaret Fuller—have declared that their motherhood was the crown and climax of all their experiences of life, I suppose the poets and painters are not very wrong about it, Catherine."
"I hope they are not, since all my instincts about it are entirely primitive and I feel that nothing in the world will compensate me if I've got to go through life childless."
"There would be one compensation," said Margaret earnestly.
"What?"
"Sometimes, since I've known I was going to have a child, the responsibility, the almost crushing responsibility, has seemed more than I could bear. That's what I meant when I spoke of ideal conditions."