But he wanted children! He could afford to have them, and he considered
it a duty as well as a glorious privilege to pour his individuality into
a new being. It was Nature's way from a true and healthy egoism towards
altruism. But she travelled on another road and made jackets for the
babies of strangers. Was that a better, a nobler thing to do? It stood
for so much, and yet was nothing but fear of the burden of motherhood,
and it was cheaper and less fatiguing to sit in the corner of a
comfortable sofa and make little jackets than to bear the toil and broil
of a nursery. It was looked upon as a disgrace to be a woman, to have
a sex, to become a mother.

That was it. They called it working for Heaven, for higher interests,
for humanity, but it was merely a pandering to vanity, to selfishness,
to a desire for fame or notoriety.

And he had pitied her, he had suffered remorse because her sterility
had made him angry. She had told him once that he deserved "the contempt
of all good and honest men" because he had failed to speak of sterile
women with the respect due to misfortune; she had told him that they
were sacred, because their sorrow was the bitterest sorrow a woman
could have to bear.

What, after all, was this woman working for? For progress? For the
salvation of humanity? No, she was working against progress, against
freedom and enlightenment. Hadn't she recently brought forward a motion
to limit religious liberty? Wasn't she the author of a pamphlet on the
intractability of servants? Wasn't she advocating greater severity in
the administration of the military laws? Was she not a supporter of the
party which strives to ruin our girls by giving them the same miserable