"A mild climate where she can be out-of-doors and relaxed."
Isabelle went to California with her mother, the trained nurse, and the child. But instead of the "mild climate," Pasadena happened to be raw and rainy. She disliked the hotel, and the hosts of idle, overdressed, and vulgar women. So her mother brought her back, as we have seen, and then there was talk of the Virginia Springs, "an excellent spring climate."
A new doctor was called in, who had his own peculiar regime of sprays and baths, of subcutaneous medicine, and then a third nerve specialist, who said, "We must find the right key," and looked as if he might have it in his office.
"The right key?"
"Her combination, the secret of her vitality. We must find it for her,—distraction, a system of physical exercises, perhaps. But we must occupy the mind. Those Christian Scientists have an idea, you know,—not that I recommend their tomfoolery; but we must accomplish their results by scientific means." And he went away highly satisfied with his liberality of view….
On one vital point the doctors were hopelessly divided. Some thought Isabelle should have another child, "as soon as may be,"—it was a chance that Nature might take to right matters. The others strongly dissented: a child in the patient's present debilitated condition would be criminal. As these doctors seemed to have the best of the argument, it was decided that for the present the wife should remain sterile, and the physicians undertook to watch over the life process, to guard against its asserting its rights.
The last illusions of romance seemed to go at this period. The simple old tale that a man and a woman loving each other marry and have the children that live within them and come from their mutual love has been rewritten for the higher classes of American women, with the aid of science. Health, economic pressure, the hectic struggle to survive in an ambitious world have altered the simple axioms of nature. Isabelle accepted easily the judgment of the doctors,—she had known so many women in a like case. Yet when she referred to this matter in talking to Alice Johnston, she caught an odd look on her cousin's face.
"I wonder if they know, the doctors—they seem always to be finding excuses for women not to have children…. We've been all through that, Steve and I; and decided we wouldn't have anything to do with it, no matter what happened. It—tarnishes you somehow, and after all does it help? There's Lulu Baxter, living in daily fear of having a child because they think they are too poor. He gets twenty-five hundred from the road—he's under Steve, you know—and they live in a nice apartment with two servants and entertain. They are afraid of falling in the social scale, if they should live differently. But she's as nervous as a witch, never wholly well, and they'll just go on, as he rises and gets more money, adding to their expenses. They will never have money enough for children, or only for one, maybe,—no, I don't believe it pays!"
"But she's so pretty, and they live nicely," Isabelle protested, and added,
"There are other things to live for besides having a lot of children—"
"What?" the older woman asked gravely.