“A nasty southeaster,” said Doctor Wilhelm, passing by beside the tall figure of the first mate.  “How would you like to come to my room?  We can smoke and have some coffee there without being disturbed.”

XI

Walking along the deck below the promenade deck, one passed a covered gangway on both the starboard and port sides, into which opened various official rooms, including the officers’ cabins, among them Doctor Wilhelm’s, a comparatively spacious room, containing a bed, a table, chairs, and a well-equipped medicine closet.

The gentlemen had scarcely seated themselves when a Red Cross sister, who worked under Doctor Wilhelm’s direction, appeared and gave a report, smiling as she did so, of a woman patient in the second cabin.

“In my two years of practice on a steamer, this is the fifth time I have had a case like this,” Doctor Wilhelm said after the sister had left.  “Girls who can no longer conceal the consequences of their mistake and are at loss what to do, take passage on a ship, when it is almost certain that the event they expect will occur.  Such girls, of course, never suspect that they are typical on all sea trips, and are surprised when our stewards and stewardesses sometimes treat them with corresponding respect.  I myself, of course, always do all I can for the poor creatures, and I usually succeed in inducing the captains not to make an announcement of the birth, in case there is one.  Once a girl about whom we could not help giving notice was found hanging to the window sash in her lodgings near the harbour.”

Over their coffee and Simon Arzt cigarettes, the whole woman question was unrolled.

“So far,” said Frederick, “the woman question is nothing but the old-maid question, at least in the way women conceive it.  The sterility of old maids sterilizes the whole movement.”

Frederick developed his ideas.  But tormenting visions of Mara and her admirer pursued him, and he discoursed mechanically, his reasoning on the woman question having become a matter of rote to him.

“The vital germinal spot of each reform in women’s rights,” he argued with apparent liveliness, blowing clouds of smoke, “must be the maternal instinct.  The cells of the future cell-state, which will be a healthier social body, is the woman with the maternal instinct.  The great women reformers are not those who would have women act just like men in all externals, but those who are conscious that all men, even the greatest, were born of women.  They are the conscious mothers of the race of men and gods.  A woman’s natural right is her right to the child, and it is a most inglorious page in the history of woman that she has allowed herself to be deprived of that right.  The birth of the child, in so far as it is not sanctioned by a man, is subject to the fire and brimstone of public scorn.  And this scorn is the most pitiful page in man’s