It is only in the act of nursing that a woman realizes her motherhood in visible and tangible fashion; it is a joy of every moment.  The milk becomes flesh before our eyes; it blossoms into the tips of those delicate flower-like fingers; it expands in tender, transparent nails; it spins the silky tresses; it kicks in the little feet.  Oh! those baby feet, how plainly they talk to us!  In them the child finds its first language.

Yes, Louise, nursing is a miracle of transformation going on before one’s bewildered eyes.  Those cries, they go to your heart and not your ears; those smiling eyes and lips, those plunging feet, they speak in words which could not be plainer if God traced them before you in letters of fire!  What else is there in the world to care about?  The father?  Why, you could kill him if he dreamed of waking the baby!  Just as the child is the world to us, so do we stand alone in the world for the child.  The sweet consciousness of a common life is ample recompense for all the trouble and suffering—­for suffering there is.  Heaven save you, Louise, from ever knowing the maddening agony of a wound which gapes afresh with every pressure of rosy lips, and is so hard to heal—­the heaviest tax perhaps imposed on beauty.  For know, Louise, and beware! it visits only a fair and delicate skin.

My little ape has in five months developed into the prettiest darling that ever mother bathed in tears of joy, washed, brushed, combed, and made smart; for God knows what unwearied care we lavish upon those tender blossoms!  So my monkey has ceased to exist, and behold in his stead a baby, as my English nurse says, a regular pink-and-white baby.  He cries very little too now, for he is conscious of the love bestowed on him; indeed, I hardly ever leave him, and I strive to wrap him round in the atmosphere of my love.

Dear, I have a feeling now for Louis which is not love, but which ought to be the crown of a woman’s love where it exists.  Nay, I am not sure whether this tender fondness, this unselfish gratitude, is not superior to love.  From all that you have told me of it, dear pet, I gather that love has something terribly earthly about it, whilst a strain of holy piety purifies the affection a happy mother feels for the author of her far-reaching and enduring joys.  A mother’s happiness is like a beacon, lighting up the future, but reflected also on the past in the guise of fond memories.

The old l’Estorade and his son have moreover redoubled their devotion to me; I am like a new person to them.  Every time they see me and speak to me, it is with a fresh holiday joy, which touches me deeply.  The grandfather has, I verily believe, turned child again; he looks at me admiringly, and the first time I came down to lunch he was moved to tears to see me eating and suckling the child.  The moisture in these dry old eyes, generally expressive only of avarice, was a wonderful comfort to me.  I felt that the good soul entered into my joy.