see him even in my waking hours, sucking at my breast. I would hear the beating of his little heart, and see his little hands playing in the air. How many times I saw him toddling before me in the courtyard! How many times I heard him calling me: Mama!

"How many times I sat beside his little bed and sang him to sleep, gazing into his angelic face and his heavenly eyes!.. But you were blind to all that. How can you not understand that if I refused to sacrifice my happiness — a thing real and existing — for the sake of children still in the womb of the future, that is, for the sake of what did not exist, I was not thereby declaring any hatred of children? Does not the proverb say: a bird in the hand is better than ten on the tree? Even so, I gave myself over to your will like a slave. You denied me the pleasure of working in the house for fear of people's talk, and I submitted. You hated me because I had borne you no bridegroom, and I loaded upon myself more than it could bear of visits to doctors and saints and monasteries. You do not know how many tears I shed in my solitudes and on my journeys! You do not know how my heart dripped blood when I saw you flee from me and turn your eyes away from me, as though I were a yellow wind! Your mother and your father longed for Azrael to snatch me away from you, that you might take yourself a 'child-bearing' wife. And here I am, striking myself out of your life; perhaps you will find a better and more fruitful one than I. I was clinging to the glimmer of a faint hope, as a drowning man clings to a straw. I bore anguish and pain and abasement and insult, saying to myself: Perhaps... I might yet bear you a bridegroom by a miracle from heaven. I thought that if I obtained that, I should win back the shadow of your former love and our first happiness. And the very strength of my desire to please you and win back your love drove me to commit a sin which, though you might forgive it me, I shall never forgive myself. Death will part us soon — why then should I fear to let you know of it?

"I carry now in my womb a little soul and a little body. It is the babe that brought the smile back to your face and the light back to your eyes. But it is not of your flesh and your blood...

"I sacrificed my pride and the purity of my body to obtain him, to

content you; but I have under-stood now that what I did is a sin past forgiving. I do not want to buy your love with deceit and

adultery... yet when I sinned, I sinned for your sake alone...

"I feel the movements of this unhappy child between my ribs