an who was a prey to stupendous nature,
which crushed her, rolled her in her blood, and exacted all the
suffering from her that she could yield.

The midwife turned up her sleeves and put on her rubber gloves. She
waved her enormous reddish-black, glistening hands like Indian clubs.

And all this turned into a nightmare in which I half believed. My head
grew heavy and I was sickened by the smell of blood and carbolic acid
poured out by the bottleful.

At a moment when I, feeling too harrowed, was not looking, I heard a
cry different from hers, a cry that was scarcely more than the sound of
a moving object, a light grating. It was the new being that had
unloosened itself, as yet a mere morsel of flesh taken from her flesh--
her heart which had just been torn away from her.

This shook me to the depths of my being. I, who had witnessed
everything that human beings undergo, I, at this first signal of human
life, felt some paternal and fraternal chord--I do not know what--
vibrating within me.

She laughed. "How quickly it went!" she said.

. . . . .

The day was coming to a close. Complete silence in the room. A plain
night lamp was burning, the flame scarcely flickering. The clock, like
a poor soul, was ticking faintly. There was hardly a thing near the
bed. It was as in a real temple.

She lay stretched out in bed, in ideal quiet, her eyes turned toward
the window. Bit by bit, she saw the evening descending upon the most
beautiful day in her life.

This ruined mass, this languid face shone with the glory of having
created, with a sort of ecstasy which redeemed her suffering, and one
saw the new world of thoughts that grew out of her experience.

She thought of the child growing up. She smiled at the joys and
sorrows it would cause her. She smiled also at the brother or sister
it would have some day.

And I thought of this at the same time that she did, and I saw her
martyrdom more clearly than she.

This massacre, this tragedy of flesh is so ordinary and commonplace
that every woman carries the memory and imprint of it, and yet nobody
really knows it. The doctor, who comes into contact with so much of
the same sort of suffering, is not moved by it any more. The woman,
who is too tender-hearted, never remembers it. Others who look on at
travail have a sentimental interest, which wipes out the agony. But I
who saw for the sake of seeing know, in all its horror, the agony of
childbirth. I s