Ellen clapped loudly, not because she had any great opinion of
unmarried mothers, whom she suspected of belonging to the same type of
woman who would start on a day's steamer excursion and then find that
she had forgotten the sandwiches, but because she was a neat-minded girl
and could not abide the State's pretence that an illegitimate baby had
only one parent when everybody knew that every baby had really two. And
she fell to wondering what this thing was that men did to women. There
was certainly some definite thing. Children, she was sure, came into the
world because of some kind of embrace; and she had learned lately, too,
that women who were very poor sometimes let men do this thing to them
for money: such were the women whom she saw in John Square, when she
came back late from a meeting or a concert, leaning against the
garden-railings, their backs to the lovely nocturnal mystery of groves
and moonlit lawns, and their faces turned to the line of rich men's
houses which mounted out of the night like a tall, impregnable fortress.
Some were grey-haired. Such traffic was perilous as it was ugly, for
somehow there were babies who were born blind because of it! That was
the sum of her knowledge. What followed the grave kisses shown in
pictures, what secret Romeo shared with Juliet, she did not know, she
would not know.

Twice she had refused to learn the truth. Once a schoolfellow named Anna
McLellan, a minister's daughter, a pale girl with straight, yellow hair
and full, whitish lips, had tried to tell her something queer about
married people as they were walking along Princes Street, and Ellen had
broken away from her and run into the Gardens. The trees and grass and
daffodils had seemed not only beautiful but pleasantly un-smirched by
the human story. And in the garret at home, in a pile of her father's
books, she had once found a medical volume which she knew from the words
on its cover would tell her all the things about which she was