“A great writer who had married and had children, whom she worshipped, once told me that the pang of motherhood is that even your children don’t seem your very own.  They are often more like some one else than their parents, perhaps the spinster sister-in-law, whom every one dislikes, or some entire alien.  Look at Regie.  He is just like me, which must be a great trial to Minna.  And they grow up bewildering their parents at every turn by characteristics they don’t understand.  But she said the spiritual children, the books, are really ours.

“If you were other than you are,” said Hester, after a long pause, “you would reprove me for worshipping my own work.  I suppose love is worship.  I loved it for itself, not for anything it was to bring me.  That is what people like Dr. Brown don’t understand.  It was part of myself.  But it was the better part.  The side of me which loves success, and which he is always appealing to, had no hand in it.  My one prayer was that I might be worthy to write it, that it might not suffer by contact with me.  I spent myself upon it.”  Hester’s voice sank.  “I knew what I was doing.  I joyfully spent my health, my eyesight, my very life upon it.  I was impelled to do it by what you perhaps will call a blind instinct, what I, poor simpleton and dupe, believed at the time to be nothing less than the will of God.”

“You will think so again,” said the Bishop, “when you realize that the book has left its mark and influence upon your character.  It has taught you a great deal.  The mere fact of writing it has strengthened you.  The outward and visible form is dead, but its spirit lives on in you.  You will realize this presently.”

“Shall I?  On the contrary, the only thing I realize is that it is not God who is mocked, but His foolish children who try to do His bidding.  It seems He is not above putting a lying spirit in the mouth of his prophets.  Do you think I still blame poor James for his bonfire, or his jealous little wife who wanted to get rid of me?  Why should I?  They acted up to their lights as your beloved Jock did when he squeezed the life out of that rabbit in Westhope Park.  In all those days when I did not say anything, it was because I felt I had been deceived.  I had done my part.  God had not done His.  He should have seen to it that the book was not destroyed.  You prayed by me once when you thought I was unconscious.  I heard all right.  I should have laughed if I could, but it was too much trouble.”

“These thoughts will pass away with your illness,” said the Bishop.  “You are like a man who has had a blow, who staggers about giddy and dazed, and sees the pavement rising up to strike him.  The pavement is firm under his feet all the time.”

“Half of me knows in a dim blind way that God is the same always,” said Hester, “while the other half says, ‘Curse God and die.’”

“That is the giddiness, the vertigo after the shock.”