-mother every day of all the weeks before
your birth. There is no word--at least from me--fine enough to describe
the course of that holy rapture. There is in a woman's love a certain
joy in the pain which is borne for love's sake, a certain ecstasy of
renunciation which no man ever feels. That once I saw it pictured. I
veil my face. She was not only divinely happy because you were coming;
she became divinely holy. Her child seemed to be a sacrifice to present
to God,--her God was very living, very near her,--and she had resolved
that he should be a perfect gift. She heard the most beautiful music,
and clothed herself in the finest fabrics. She had her room hung with
angelic faces, where her eyes could open first upon them in the
morning. Those are the pictures that hang in our cabin. I could never
tell you why I chose them. Mona Lisa was banished, though she loved
her, too. But she said, "He shall have the simplicity of God; he shall
not bear the beauty of the world." She read the most wonderful books
then, the simplest, the most exalted. I have tried to remember her
choice among them, and it seems to me now that she chose always what
had the wisdom of truth and love, and that she shrank from the
sparkling and clever. I cannot tell you all her thoughts about you, nor
all her hopes. For, indeed, the confidences were mine, and near as you
are to me, she is nearer. Perhaps I could never have told you if you
had not begun to see what it is to love a woman. But the substance of
it all seems to be this: she loved you before she saw you; she
worshiped the very thought of your coming. She seemed to feel that she
was not a passive instrument chosen to bring you into the world. (You
see I speak personally now of the Unknowable. It is because she did so.
To her, all the powers that fashion and rule were blended in One, and
He was warm and living, and she loved Him. Yet her idea was not
anthropomorphic. It was colossal. This was and is incomprehensible to
me; but I am trying now to enter her habit of mind.) A passive
instrument, did I write? She was, in a way, your creator. The vital
spark came from her God through love and her, and she would not hamper
it by any earthly clogs of groveling inheritance. Well--her watching
upon her arms was over. She saw her son. And then she gave him to me to
finish her work, and died. Now the knowledge of her great love and
expectation seems to belong to you, and I have only this to say: If you
fee