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SMALL SOULS
if she happened to read about it somewhere in one of her occasional fits of reading, she would think:
“It’s only a book; and the author is writing fine words.”
But, at the same time, her gentle nature was too superlatively and exquisitely feminine and also too motherly to look upon physical love as the only needful thing. No, what she had felt as a duty in the case of her first husband and as passion in the case of Van der Welcke had soon turned to mother-love. Married, in her passion she had at once longed for a child. And she had worshipped her child from the very first day. . . .
