“You have led me on, and must take the consequences!” she cried. “Imagine,” she continued with diabolical deliberation, “if Marion, on any day previous to this, had gone to her mother and expressed an overpowering maternal instinct—a deep desire to have a child!”
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Lady Engleton.
“Why so shocked, since it is so holy?”
“But that is different.”
“Ah! then it is holy only when the social edict goes forth, and proclaims the previous evil good and the previous good evil.”
“Come, come; the inconsistency is not quite so bad as that. (How that man does dawdle!)”
Hadria shrugged her shoulders. “It seems to me so; for now suppose, on the other hand, that this same Marion, on any day subsequent to this, should go to that same mother, and announce an exactly opposite feeling—a profound objection to the maternal function—how would she be received? Heavens, with what pained looks, with what platitudes and proverbs, with what reproofs and axioms and sentiments! She would issue forth from that interview like another St. Sebastian, stuck all over with wounds and arrows. ‘Sacred mission,’ ‘tenderest joy,’ ‘holiest mission,’ ‘highest vocation’—one knows the mellifluous phrases.”
“But after all she would be wrong in her objection. The instinct is a true one,” said Lady Engleton.
“Oh, then why should she be pelted for expressing it previously, if the question is not indiscreet?”
“Well, it would seem rather gruesome, if girls were to be overpowered with that passion.”