her children are often performed, as efficiently and as tenderly as any mother could perform them, by an aunt or a nurse; but they have never, when so performed, called forth the flood of idealism and admiration which has been lavished upon the purely physical relationship of mother and child as typified by a woman suckling her offspring. The sight of a mother so engaged has meant inspiration to a good many men; I may be wrong, but I do not imagine that it will ever mean real inspiration to any woman.
My own opinion—which I put forth in all diffidence, as one of the uninitiated—is, that while women, left to themselves, have considerably less reverence than men have for the physical aspect of maternity, they have a good deal more respect for its other aspects. Thus I have several times asked women whom I knew from the circumstances of their lives to have been exposed to temptation whether the thought that they might some day bear a child had not been a conscious and not merely an instinctive factor in their resistance to temptation and the restraint they had put upon their passions and emotions; and the reply has usually been in the affirmative.
