Aleda, the youngest of the Wallace girls was also there, and seventeen years had developed a truly pretty and healthy girl from the delicate querulous child. Another new comer had engaged her attention. Reading from a volume of Tennyson, a boy scarce older than herself was reclining at her feet. He too had been brought there by a mother, not one who had fled the cruelties of an unappreciative husband, as she had never applied the title to any man. He had been a child of love.
His mother, in the wild sweet delirium of a first love, had abandoned herself to her artist lover without a thought of right or wrong. And he, pure and noble had no thought of wronging her. But disease had early marked him for its own, and ere the child of his Wilma had seen the light of day his own life had closed in that sleep that knows no waking, and she was left alone to buffet the storms of life as best she could, an orphan and without friends. With a babe in her arms, of “illegal” origin, the path of her life had not been strewn with roses. But amidst all her privations and trials she had kept her love pure for her child and had fostered only instincts pure and holy in the young mind, and when she heard of the home she applied at its gates, telling her story in pure, unvarnished words, never dreaming of an effort to hide any of her past. Only by the light of truth could the delicate fair woman thread her path through the world.
As might be expected, she had been received with open arms. Wilma, the mother of Horace, our young poet, and Honora, Katie’s mother, could now be seen as they stand arm in arm watching the golden sunset and the children whose future promises to bring with it less of the pain that has so early drawn silver threads through their own brown locks.
The world at large knew not the full meaning of this home as yet. The world is yet too completely steeped in superstition and ignorance to have permitted its existence had the full meaning been known. The “Hunter Co-operative Home” it had been called, and thus it was known to the world. It was known that babes had made their advent therein, but none but the initiated knew that marriage as an institution was banished from its encircling walls.
Would you ask us if happiness was so unalloyed within those walls that no pangs of regret or of pain could enter there? Well, no! We are not so foolish as to make such claim. There are hours of temptation; there are moments of forgetfulness; there are sometimes swift, keen, torturing pangs that nothing earthly can completely shut out. Our heroes and heroines are not angels. They are—when the very best of them has been said—only intelligent, sensible and sensitive men and women—but men and women who are possessed of high ideals and who are striving hard to reach and practicalize them. They live in a world of thought. They do nothing blindly, inconsiderately; their every action is done with eyes wide open. In trying to gain the goal they have set themselves to reach, they strive not to think of self alone. The future of those who have been entrusted to their care, the young lives their love has called into existence, exacts from them much of self-denial. They are individualists, yet not so absolutely such that they do not realize that sometimes the ego must be held in check so as not to rob another of his, or her birthright.
You ask again, “Does this home life, as you have pictured insure against the possibility of the affections changing?”
And again we answer, No! Certainly not. Such changes will and must come. Yet it is not to be expected that where there is liberty, in the fullest sense of the word, life will be a constant wooing? Is it not the lack of liberty that deals the death blow to many a happy, many a once happy home? to many a home that was founded in the sweetest of hopes, the brightest of prospects, only to be shattered and wrecked in a few short years? aye, even a few short months or weeks? And when such a change does come, in spite of all efforts to prevent, how great a thing it must be to know yourself free! free to embrace the new love without the horrible stigma of “shame!” as our modern society now brands it, and which stigma causes such unspeakable misery, such endless suffering.
And if a woman desires to repeat the experience of motherhood, why should it be wrong when she selects another to be the father of her, instead of the one who has once performed this office for her? Why should the act be less pure when she bestows a second love, when the object of this second love is just as true, just as noble, just as pure-minded as was the first one? Why should an act be considered a crime with one partner which had been fully justified with another?
Reader, judge me not hastily. Judge not my ideas, my ideals, without having first made a careful study of life as you find it around you. My words are backed by personal experience and observation, experience as bitter as any that has been herein recorded. Indeed I doubt if I should, or could, ever have given birth to the thoughts expressed in these pages had it not been for that experience—which is one of a thousand—and when you have carefully weighed my words, think of the good that must result to future generations when unions are purely spontaneous, saying nothing of the increase of happiness to those who are permitted thus to choose, and to live.