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What did it mean? What was weighed? What was found wanting? And what was this blackness? Was she fainting? Or, oh, was she dying!

Heavens! Was this dying? Was she sinking, failing, letting go of life? Don’t let her die! Oh, don’t let her die! She didn’t want to leave all these pleasant things. She was afraid. For, oh, she was not fit to die! She must have made some exclamation, for the nurse was sprinkling her face. "It is all right," the woman was saying. "She is coming to. It’s not unusual. " Yes; it was no longer black about her: she was in the middle of a great light; she seemed to be withering in it, like a leaf in the fire. In the middle of the great light she saw herself for what she was. In that unknown and vast beyond, her little worthless soul would be lost. That was the kind of soul she had — a little, worthless, paltering one.

That was the kind of soul, then, she had given to her boy. He was to grow up in this great moving world as trifling, as light-minded, as slight as she, she who cared only for the pleasures that waste the body and starve the soul! His little velvet cheek lay on her breast — oh, how dear he was; how sweet he was, the little new person! And she had made him as useless, as light as a bubble. She recalled a deceit she had practised just before his birth — a scandal she had stimulated; the case that had been laid before her of bringing out a poor man’s family for just the money that would buy the emerald cross she wanted, and she had taken refuge behind the immigration laws, and there were the emeralds in her jewel-case; her face burnt to remember the champagne she drank the night she first wore those emeralds — heaven knows what silly things she said! Yes, yes; there was no help for it, this son of hers would want ease, glitter, wine, bibelots! Pleasures that had been follies in her would be follies in him, too, and worse than follies. Her frivolity would be in him effeminacy, her idleness would have made him a voluptuary. He would know nothing and care less for the sin and sorrow on his right hand and his left; he would not waste an hour of his laughing life on any of the grief and pain that made discord in the music. A silken sybarite, he would yield to every temptation; every gaiety would allure him. The thrones of the world might rock, he would not know it if his clubs were sound. His ambitions would be in his clothes, in his horses. He would have no strength to fight the forces of evil — he would be a part of them. Insufficient, of no purpose in the great scheme of the growth of the race — oh, was she thinking of her boy, her little son, the dear new, tender life? And then again that sinking, that slipping into outer darkness.

No, no, she must overcome it; she must not die; there was something for her to do; she could not afford to die! She could not have him, when his time came, go out into the dark the trumpery thing she was herself, as he needs must if she did not live to hinder it. He would be without strength to resist the press of evil, for she had given him no strength; he would be without impulse to do good, for she had given him no impulse; he would be without value in the scales of the universe, for she had given him no value. She must live to lead him past the temptation, for she would recognize it; to bid him to see the pitfall; to find, herself, and show to him, the shining mark beyond; to help him in all those straits and perils where being her son, he must otherwise be helpless. That other woman whom the doctor was to bring, that foster-mother, she must go away again. They should give her something for her own baby; but she could not have this one. She might be a better woman; he might draw force and will from her; but from his own mother he would draw love, and the love should keep him safe.