e gave him his security about it. Sheila
never told him of the compact of that anguished night, but gradually he
became as sure that she had given up her talent forever as if he had
heard her pledge. "Little wife!" he often called her, "Little mother!"
And always it was as if he said to her, "What other name could be half
so sweet?"

And she told herself that he was right. Never had there been a better
husband. And to be loved by a man like that, a man clean and fine and
kind; to be the mother of such a man's child, she was very certain was
worth more to a woman than any other honors or fulfillments which life
could bring her. She had known that always, even when she first
discovered--so bitterly!--that Ted was not in sympathy with her gift
and her ambitions; and she knew it more surely as time went on. There
were moments when she wished ardently that the sympathy between them
had been more absolute; when she thought that, happy as she was, she
would have been happier if their tastes had gone hand-in-hand like
their hearts. But there was never a time when she would have exchanged
Ted for any other man, or when she felt it possible to have done
without him. There are women who, married, feed their discontents with
visions of what life could have been in freedom or with some other man
than they have chosen. Sheila was not of this sort. Having crossed
the threshold of marriage, she did not look behind her at the
alluring--and elusive--road of might-have-been.

She hoped, now, for other children. With this utter surrender of
herself to the woman's life, there came to her the longing for many
children, for all her arms could hold. The sum of that creative force
which, under different circumstances, would have flowed into her work,
all its denied passion and vitality, was transmuted into the instinct
of motherhood. Because of her creative gift, there was literally more
life within her, more life to bestow, and so, the channel of artistic
expression being closed to her, she yearned to spend it all upon
maternity; to have, indeed, as many children as her arms could hold.

Had these desired children come to her, peace might have been hers
finally and entirely. But the desire was not granted. Eric grew out
of his babyhood to a fine, sturdy boyhood, and was still the only
child. And now Sheila, a woman of thirty and ten years married, began
to feel again, and more strongly than ever in her life, the urge of her