There was no one in all Silvertree whom the discriminating would so quickly have mentioned as the ideal wife as Mrs. Barrington.  She herself, no doubt, so Kate concluded with her merciless young psychology, regarded herself as noble.  But the people in Silvertree had a passion for thinking of themselves as noble.  They had, Kate said to herself bitterly, so few charms that they had to fall back on their virtues.  In the face of all this it became increasingly difficult to think of marriage as a goal for herself, and her letters to McCrea were further and further apart as the slow weeks passed.  She had once read the expression, “the authentic voice of happiness,” and it had lived hauntingly in her memory.  Could Ray speak that?  Would she, reading his summons from across half the world, hasten to him, choose him from the millions, face any future with him?  She knew she would not.  No, no; union with the man of average congeniality was not her goal.  There must be something more shining than that for her to speed toward it.

However, one day she caught, opportunely, a hint of the further meanings of a woman’s life.  Honora provided a great piece of news, and illuminated with a new understanding, Kate wrote:—­

     “My dear, dear girl:—­

“You write me that something beautiful is going to happen to you.  I can guess what it is and I agree that it is glorious, though it does take my breath away.  Now there are two of you—­and by and by there will be three, and the third will be part you and part David and all a miracle.  I can see how it makes life worth living, Honora, as nothing else could—­nothing else!

“Mummy wouldn’t like me to write like this.  She doesn’t approve of women whose understanding jumps ahead of their experiences.  But what is the use of pretending that I don’t encompass your miracle?  I knew all about it from the beginning of the earth.

“This will mean that you will have to give up your laboratory work with David, I suppose.  Will that be a hardship?  Or are you glad of the old womanly excuse for passing by the outside things, and will you now settle down to be as fine a mother as you were a chemist?  Will you go further, my dear, and make a fuss about your house and go all delicately bedizened after the manner of the professors’ nice little wives—­go in, I mean, for all the departments of the feminine profession?

“I do hope you’ll have a little son, Honora, not so much on your account as on his.  During childhood a girl’s feet are as light as a boy’s bounding over the earth; but when once childhood is over, a man’s life seems so much more coherent than a woman’s, though it is not really so important.  But it takes precisely the experience you are going through to give it its great significance, doesn’t it?

“What other career is there for real women, I wonder?  What, for example,