And then again, “I am in ecstasy, because I am to bear a child, a child of my own!  Oh, wonderful, wonderful!  But suddenly my ecstasy is shot through with terror, because the father of this child is a man I do not love.  There is no use trying to deceive myself—­nor you!  I must have one human soul with whom I can talk about it as it really is.  I do not love him, I never did love him, I never shall love him!

“Oh, how could they have all been so mistaken?  Here is Aunt Varina—­one of those who helped to persuade me into this marriage.  She told me that love would come; it seemed to be her idea—­my mother had it too—­that you had only to submit yourself to a man, to follow and obey him, and love would take possession of your heart.  I tried credulously, and it did not happen as they promised.  And now, I am to bear him a child; and that will bind us together for ever!

“Oh, the despair of it—­I do not love the father of my child!  I say, The child will be partly his, perhaps more his than mine.  It will be like him—­it will have this quality and that, the very qualities, perhaps, that are a source of distress to me in the father.  So I shall have these things before me day and night, all the rest of my life; I shall have to see them growing and hardening; it will be a perpetual crucifixion of my mother-love.  I seek to comfort myself by saying, The child can be trained differently, so that he will not have these qualities.  But then I think, No, you cannot train him as you wish.  Your husband will have rights to the child, rights superior to your own.  Then I foresee the most dreadful strife between us.

“A shrewd girl-friend once told me that I ought to be better or worse; I ought not to see people’s faults as I do, or else I ought to love people less.  And I can see that I ought to have been too good to make this marriage, or else not too good to make the best of it.  I know that I might be happy as Mrs. Douglas van Tuiver, if I could think of the worldly advantages, and the fact that my child will inherit them.  But instead, I see them as a trap, in which not only ourselves but the child is caught, and from which I cannot save us.  Oh, what a mistake a woman makes when she marries a man with the idea that she is going to change him!  He will not change, he will not have the need of change suggested to him.  He wants peace in his home—­which means that he wants to be what he is.

“Sometimes I can study the situation quite coolly, and as if it didn’t concern me at all.  He has required me to subject my mind to his.  But he will not be content with a general capitulation; he must have a surrender from each individual soldier, from every rebel hidden in the hills.  He tracks them out (my poor, straggling, feeble ideas) and either they take the oath of allegiance, or they are buried where they lie.  The process is like the spoiling of a child, I find; the more you give him, the more he wants.  And if any little thing is refused, then you see him set out upon a regular campaign to break you down and get it.”