She was free from the old uncomplaining compliance with a husband’s will. Modern individualism had done that for her.
She was free! Uncoerced by family authority, uncoerced by ecclesiastical authority, uncoerced by marital authority, she was almost limitlessly free!
There being no external force compelling her to bear children, she had to follow internal instinct.
That instinct, if it had existed in her, would have been a sufficient guide. It would have been a commanding guide. It would have been the best possible guide. Rising in her from the original eternal life-power it would have driven her to child-bearing more surely than she could have been driven to it by any external agency whatsoever.
But the instinct toward child-bearing could 175 not now be revived in Marie. With the cessation from struggle and from effort and from fatigue and from discipline and from the sorrow of pain that brings the joy of accomplishment, with that cessation the instinct toward child-bearing had reached cessation, too. With the petrifaction of its soil it had withered away.
Nobody had ever tried to bring Marie back to the soil of struggle. Nobody,—not her father, not her mother, not her husband, not one of her friends, not one of her teachers had ever taught her to return to life by returning to labor.
The greatest wrong possible to a woman had been wrought upon her.
She had been sedulously trained out of the life of the race into race-death.
Yet when it got talked around among her friends that she didn’t want children, people blamed her and said it was very surprising, in view of all that had been done for her.