id. "Then I think we are being
tempted like the first Adam and Eve. They were commanded to multiply
and reign. You and I wouldn't ask anything better, but as a rule one's
duty is not attractive. It seems to me just as likely that we are to
prove that the lesson is learned, and a man and woman may love each
other unselfishly and nobly, foregoing their own desires to save
others. Under the old dispensation it was said, 'Greater love hath no
man than this;' is it not possible now that the greatest love is that
which lays down its life untransmitted? If Christ could pray that the
cup of suffering and death might pass from Him, dare we press the
bitter draught of being to other lips?"

"Dare we dash the full goblet of joy and opportunity from them?" asked
Adam, gravely.

"I wish I knew," she said. "I wish I knew!"

"Have you ever thought what it will mean," he said, "if we adopt the
other alternative? Have you thought of the desolation and loneliness
of growing old and helpless and finally--" He stopped, and she threw
out her hands as if to ward off the thoughts he called before her.

"Oh, yes, yes, I have thought, and it is terrible. I keep remembering
a picture I saw in the French Exhibit. It was of a man and a woman;
the woman was dead, and he had dug her grave, his broken sword lay at
his side, and he had wrapped her in his coat, and begun to cover her
over. He could not go on, and knelt, looking at her with a despair on
his face that has haunted me ever since. The name, Manon Lescaut,
meant nothing to me then, but the story of the picture was enough by
itself. All last year I kept seeing that terrible picture. Sometimes
it was you, sometimes it was I, that dug the grave and went mad
looking into it."

"I should not bury you," said Adam, grimly. "I should carry you to the
cliff and take you in my arms and jump. The sea is deep and cruel
there."

"Sometimes," she hesitated a moment, then went on,--"sometimes I think
that would be the best way for us now, I mean if we decide we have no
right to be happy in the old way; for I should be afraid we could not
always be strong."

"Very well," he answered; "when we decide, it shall be literally life
or death."

XX

The ant and the moth have cells for each of their young,
but our little ones lie in festering heaps in homes that
consume them like graves; and night by night, from the
corners of our streets, rises up the cry of the
homeless,--"