he door, or
raise the tent-flap? Home is the thing that nourishes, that cherishes,
that puts its arms about you and says, Rest here!

"I know--for father and Evelyn made a home for me. Father is like me.
He is lost, shipwrecked, ruined, if his heart is n't sheltered. I
don't know what I think about divorces and re-marriages. It is all so
perplexing. I do not know at all. But I know you broke up a home, and
Evelyn made one. Whatever people do, if they can do that for a child
as father and Evelyn did it for me, I should n't wonder if they are
justified before gods and men!"

The rapid sentences fell like hammer-strokes upon Clarissa's naked
heart. She felt that she ought to be {205} defending her beliefs, but
she could not take her eyes from Marvel's glowing face, and the girl
went swiftly on:--

"The people that you follow--they admit the race lives for the child,
that the mother must risk her life to give it life. Then, they seem to
think, the sacrifice can cease. But if you know about homes, you know
better. As she gives her body to be the matrix of another body, so she
must give her spirit to make a shelter that shall be the matrix of
another spirit. If she refuses to do this, she fails, and all her
labor is in vain. It is very simple. As I see the world, the mothers
must die daily all their lives. There is no other way. It is a part of
life, just as bearing and birth are parts of life. No one denies that
they are hard--hard--hard. But that is the glory of it! Nothing is
worth while that lacks the {206} labor and the danger, the pain and
the difficulty!"

For once in her life Clarissa was speechless. Words would not come.
The inherited weapon of her own fluency had been turned against
herself. For as other women had been shaken from their old faiths and
allegiances by Clarissa's gift of tongues, even so had she been shaken
by her child. The girl's young cogency had struck her dumb.

In the long minutes of silence that followed, Clarissa was, perhaps,
more truly a mother than she had been since Marvel first lay in the
circle of her arm. She saw a daughter's point of view at last. She
knew which proclaimed the deeper doctrine, which was the truer prophet
of humanity, her child or she.

Yet when she spoke at last, it was {207} not to discourse of Humanity.
Humanity was forgotten; she and her child were all. Her lips shaped,
unbidden, that old, old demand of the hungry heart.

"Marvel--don't you _love_ me at all?