Beth was thinking that America was not yet aeons distant from this Japanese institution, the male incubus of the girl child.  She did not speak, for she was thinking of what she had said in the studio—­of the edginess of her temper.  “Spinsters may scold, but not spiritual mothers,” she thought.  She might have been very happy, but for a mental anchor fast to that gloomy mood of the morning....  Hours had flown magically.  It was past mid-afternoon....  There was one more picture that had held him, not for itself, but like the Japanese scene, for the thoughts it incited....  An aged woman in a cheerless room, bending over the embers of a low fire.  In the glow, the weary old face revealed a bitter loneliness, and yet it was strangely sustained.  The twisted hands held to the fire, would have fitted exactly about the waist of a little child—­which was not there.

“I would call her The Race Mother,” Bedient said reverently.  “She is of every race, and every age.  She has carried her brothers and her sons; given them her strength; shielded them from cold winds and dangerous heats; given them the nourishment of her body and the food prepared with her hands.  Their evils were her own deeper shame; their goodness or greatness was of her conceiving, her dreams first.  Her sons have turned to her in hunger, her mate in passion, but neither as their equal.  For that which was noble in their sight and of good report, they turned to men.  In their counsels they have never asked her voice; they suffered her sometimes to listen to their devotions, but hers were given to them_.

“They were stronger.  They chose what should become the intellectual growth of the race.  Having no part in this, her mind was stunted, according to their standards.  She had the silences, the bearing, the services for others, the giving of love.  She loved her mate sometimes, her brothers often, her sons always,—­and served them.  Loving much, she learned to love God.  Silences, and much loving of men, one learns to love God.  Silences and services and much loving of her kind—­out of these comes the spirit which knows God.

“So while her men, like children with heavy blocks, were passing their intellectual matters one to the other, she came to know that love is giving; that as love pours out in service, the Holy Spirit floods in; that spaciousness of soul is immortality; that out of the spaciousness of soul, great sons are born....  And here and there down the ages, these great sons have appeared, veered the race right at moments of impending destruction, and buoyed it on.”

He had not raised his voice above that low animate tone, which has not half the carrying quality of a whisper.  Beth had hoped for such a moment, for in her heart she knew that Vina Nettleton had felt this power of his.  With her whole soul, she listened, and the look upon his face which she wanted for the portrait lived in her mind as he resumed: