'GOD'S PEACE' 329
them bear their children in pain, as if they were not rewarded tenfold for the bitterest suffering the moment they hold their chi],d in their arms, as if it could possibly be worth while being a mother if one did not pay the penalty of pain.
' At first I thought, " It is the men who in sym- pathetic pity write so foolishly about something they do not understand," but later on I read the same in still stronger words in books written by women who pretended to speak for women. These women writers, often wives and mothers, seem quite offended that nature has laid the burden of motherhood on woman, thus keeping her from taking part in what, they think more important objects of life. I don't understand these women, they terrify me. I see them before me with faces disfigured by their revolt against nature. To read their books makes me ill and sad.'
But Greta added, after a pause : ' You see, I think that why I feel this so strongly is because I lost my mother when I was so tiny. All the unsatisfied longing for a mother's tenderness has developed the mother feeling in me. I, who did not know what it was to sit on a mother's lap, could not bear even as a little girl to see a child without taking it up in my arms and cuddling it.'
Thus talked the motherless about the motherless. And while she walked there in her radiant health, speaking her thoughts so proudly and purely, I felt that I could not give my son a better fate than to be born of such a mother.
