Twilight Sleep by Edith Wharton Page B

housekeeping and child–bearing—"
    She stopped, drew a quick breath, met Nona's astonished gaze over
rows of bewildered eye–glasses, and felt herself plunging into an
abyss. But she caught at the edge, and saved herself from the
plunge—
    "That's what our antagonists say—the women who are afraid to be
mothers, ashamed to be mothers, the women who put their enjoyment
and their convenience and what they call their happiness before the
mysterious heaven–sent joy, the glorious privilege, of bringing
children into the world—"
    A round of applause from the reassured mothers. She had done it!
She had pulled off her effect from the very jaws of disaster. Only
the swift instinct of recovery had enabled her, before it was too
late, to pass off the first sentences of her other address, her
Birth Control speech, as the bold exordium of her hymn to
motherhood! She paused a moment, still inwardly breathless, yet
already sure enough of herself to smile back at Nona across her
unsuspecting audience—sure enough to note that her paradoxical
opening had had a much greater effect than she could have hoped to
produce by the phrases with which she had meant to begin.
    A hint for future oratory—
    Only—the inward nervousness subsisted. The discovery that she
could lose not only her self–control but her memory, the very sense
of what she was saying, was like a hand of ice pointing to an
undecipherable warning.
    Nervousness, fatigue, brain–exhaustion … had her fight against
them been vain? What was the use of all the months and years of
patient Taylorized effort against the natural human fate: against
anxiety, sorrow, old age—if their menace was to reappear whenever
events slipped from her control?
    The address ended in applause and admiring exclamations. She had
won her way straight to those trustful hearts, still full of
personal memories of a rude laborious life, or in which its stout
tradition lingered on in spite of motors, money and the final word
in plumbing.
    Pauline, after the dispersal of the Mothers, had gone up to her
room still dazed by the narrowness of her escape. Thank heaven she
had a free hour! She threw herself on her lounge and turned her
gaze inward upon herself: an exercise for which she seldom had the
leisure.
    Now that she knew she was safe, and had done nothing to discredit
herself or the cause, she could penetrate an inch or two farther
into the motive power of her activities; and what she saw there
frightened her. To be Chairman of the Mothers' Day Association,
and a speaker at the Birth Control banquet! It did not need her
daughter's derisive chuckle to give her the measure of her
inconsequence. Yet to reconcile these contradictions had seemed as
simple as to invite the Chief Rabbi and the Bishop of New York to
meet Amalasuntha's Cardinal. Did not the Mahatma teach that, to
the initiated, all discords were resolved into a higher harmony?
When her hurried attention had been turned for a moment on the
seeming inconsistency of encouraging natality and teaching how to
restrict it, she had felt it was sufficient answer to say that the
two categories of people appealed to were entirely different, and
could not be "reached" in the same way. In ethics, as in
advertising, the main thing was to get at your public. Hitherto
this argument had satisfied her. Feeling there was much to be said
on both sides, she had thrown herself with equal zeal into the
propagation of both doctrines; but now, surveying her attempt with
a chastened eye, she doubted its expediency.
    Maisie Bruss, appearing with notes and telephone messages, seemed
to reflect this doubt in her small buttoned–up face.
    "Oh, Maisie! Is there anything important? I'm dead tired." It
was an admission she did not often make.
    "Nothing much. Three or four papers have 'phoned for copies of
your address. It was a great success."
    A faint glow of satisfaction wavered through Pauline's
perplexities. She did not pretend to eloquence; she knew her
children