a pretty good cook myself.«
    »So am I,« said I.
    »Well, then,« said he, »I really think you can understand me better than you
would seem to do, judging by your words and your silence.«
    Said I: »Perhaps that is so; but people putting in practice commonly this
sense of interest in the ordinary occupations of life rather startles me. I will
ask you a question or two presently about that. But I want to return to the
position of women amongst you. You have studied the emancipation of women
business of the nineteenth century: don't you remember that some of the superior
women wanted to emancipate the more intelligent part of their sex from the
bearing of children?«
    The old man grew quite serious again. Said he: »I do remember about that
strange piece of baseless folly, the result, like all other follies of the
period, of the hideous class tyranny which then obtained. What do we think of it
now? you would say. My friend, that is a question easy to answer. How could it
possibly be but that maternity should be highly honoured amongst us? Surely it
is a matter of course that the natural and necessary pains which the mother must
go through form a bond of union between man and woman, an extra stimulus to love
and affection between them, and that this is universally recognised. For the
rest, remember that all the artificial burdens of motherhood are now done away
with. A mother has no longer any mere sordid anxieties for the future of her
children. They may indeed turn out better or worse; they may disappoint her
highest hopes; such anxieties as these are a part of the mingled pleasure and
pain which goes to make up the life of mankind. But at least she is spared the
fear (it was most commonly the certainty) that artificial disabilities would
make her children something less than men and women: she knows that they will
live and act according to the measure of their own faculties. In times past, it
is clear that the Society of the day helped its Judaic god, and the Man of
Science of the time, in visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children. How
to reverse this process, how to take the sting out of heredity, has for long
been one of the most constant cares of the thoughtful men amongst us. So that,
you see, the ordinarily healthy woman (and almost all our women are both healthy
and at least comely), respected as a child-bearer and rearer of children,
desired as