ich will never be of use; the equipment of a
marionette; linen as soft as lint, bibs round and puffy as cockades. I
have spread everything out in front of me, and each article as it passes
through my hands assumes a shadowy lifelikeness.

Two months before I shall really know whether I am to be like other
mothers, a brooding hen, with folded wings and in-turned heart,
passionate for my own children, cattish and carping in my attitude
toward other children. Two months before I shall know the secret force
of that wild love which, they say, springs up all at once.

I am being initiated however. The other women give me a hearty welcome;
they make the impression of crowding together to make room for me. A
real sisterhood? Or the imperceptible joy of seeing a rival temporarily
diminished? Under their escort I enter into the forbidden arcana. "What
do you feel? _I_----" They make me a target for their reminiscences.

Each shamelessly outdoes the other. From the quantity and finished
preciseness of the details narrated I infer that the story has been oft
told. The least loquacious are the mothers who "have had a lot of them."
These have nothing left but a vast, frequently refreshed memory in which
their life merges in a blur with the life they have so many times
carried beneath their hearts.

Which of them am I to believe? Many have broached the subject to me,
many have discussed it, none has told me the secret of being a mother,
the word that would reveal, the sign, flashing and disappearing, by
which the treasure awaiting me would shine from afar, which would _make
me understand_. I have heard them bemoan the misery of the months before
childbirth and the sufferings of childbirth itself. I have heard them
boast, with the reverence of fetich-worship, of the care they gave their
little ones. But here their maternity stops. I still do not know. I have
two months to wait.

I plunge my fingers into the milky mass of the little garments. "Do
you," I say to my husband, "see the head of your child underneath this
hood? Let us try to imagine...."

He smiles without answering, shaken in his flesh, so lucid and so well
prepared for his approaching fatherhood that I feel myself a hundred
leagues behind. He, at least, knows why he will love his child, why he
already loves it.

As for me, my vision is obscured by the disconcerting pictures drawn by
the other women. Perhaps also I am under the ancestral pressure exerted
by the long