John does not know how much I really suffer. He knows there is no reason to suffer, and that satisfies him.

He is very careful and loving, and hardly lets me stir without special direction.

It is a very awkward thing, sometimes, to have a logical mind.

“What is a ‘wife’ exactly?” she demanded, a dangerous gleam in her eye. “A wife is the woman who belongs to a man,” he began.

“Life is a struggle, has to be,” he insisted. “If there is no struggle, there is no life – that’s all.”

To them the country was a unit – it was theirs. They themselves were a unit, a conscious group; they thought in terms of the community. As such, their time-sense was not limited to the hopes and ambitions of an individual life. Therefore, they habitually considered and carried out plans for improvement which might cover centuries.

They had early observed the value of certain improvements, had easily inferred that there was room for more, and took the greatest pains to develop two kinds of minds – the critic and inventor.

But these women were working all together at the grandest of tasks – they were Making People – and they made them well.

There you have it. You see, they were Mothers, not in our sense of helpless involuntary fecundity, forced to fill and overfill the land, every land, and then see their children suffer, sin, and die, fighting horribly with one another; but in the sense of Conscious Makers of People. Mother-love with them was not a brute passion, a mere “instinct,” a