sic among all civilized
people. The longer one lives, the more thoroughly one realizes the
soundness of this respect. The earth and its works _are_ good. Most
human conceptions are barred by strange inconsistencies. The man who
praises the works of the Creator as all wise not infrequently treats
His arrangement for carrying on the race as if it were unfit to be
spoken of in polite society. Nowhere does the modern God-fearing man
come nearer to sacrilege than in his attitude toward the divine plan
for renewing life.

A strange mixture of sincerity and hypocrisy, self-flagellation and
lust, aspiration and superstition, has gone into the making of this
attitude. With the development of it we have nothing to do here. What
does concern us is the effect of this profanity on the Business of
Being a Woman.

The central fact of the woman's life--Nature's reason for her--is the
child, his bearing and rearing. There is no escape from the divine
order that her life must be built around this constraint, duty, or
privilege, as she may please to consider it. But from the beginning to
the end of life she is never permitted to treat it naturally and
frankly. As a child accepting all that opens to her as a matter of
course, she is steered away from it as if it were something evil. Her
first essays at evasion and spying often come to her in connection
with facts which are sacred and beautiful and which she is perfectly
willing to accept as such if they were treated intelligently and
reverently. If she could be kept from all knowledge of the procession
of new life except as Nature reveals it to her, there would be reason
in her treatment. But this is impossible. From babyhood she breathes
the atmosphere of unnatural prejudices and misconceptions which
envelop the fact.

Throughout her girlhood the atmosphere grows thicker. She finally
faces the most perilous and beautiful of experiences with little more
than the ideas which have come to her from the confidences of
evil-minded servants, inquisitive and imaginative playmates, or the
gossip she overhears in her mother's society. Every other matter of
her life, serious and commonplace, has received careful attention, but
here she has been obliged to feel her way and, worst of abominations,
to feel it with an inner fear that she ought not to know or seek to
know.

If there were no other reason for the modern woman's revolt against
marriage, the usual attitude toward its central facts woul