You see, that was the wrong, perverted idea of motherhood--'conceiving without sin.' It's an unclean dogma in its implications.

I knew somewhere once a man named Milo Barrus--a sort of cheap village atheist, I remember, but one thing I recall hearing him say seems now to have a certain crude truth in it.

He said: 'There's my old mother, seventy-eight this spring, bent, gray, and wasted with the work of raising us seven children; she's slaved so hard for fifty years that she's worn her wedding-ring to a fine thread, and her hands look as if they had a thousand knuckles and joints in them.

But she smiles like a girl of sixteen, she was never cross or bitter to one of us hounds, and I believe she never even _wanted_ to complain in all her days.

And there's a look of noble capacity in her face, of soul dignity, that you never saw in any Madonna's.