I've always thought her
abandoned as to wifely and motherly instinct. What you say proves she was
a lovable girl, ruined by society, through the medium of her mother and
friends."
"If she cared for me as she said, she should have been enough of a
woman----" began Mr. Minturn.
"Maybe she _should_, but you must take into consideration that she was not
herself when the trouble began; she was, as are all women, even those most
delighted over the prospect, in an unnatural condition, _in so far that
usual conditions were unusual_, and probably made her ill, nervous,
apprehensive, not herself at all."
"Do you mean to say that you are changing?"
"Worse than that!" she said emphatically. "I have positively and
permanently changed. Even at your expense I will do Nellie justice. James,
your grievance is not against your wife; it is against the mother who bore
her, the society that moulded her."
"She should have been woman enough----" he began.
"Left alone, she was!" insisted Mrs. Winslow. "With the ills and
apprehensions of motherhood upon her, she yielded as most young,
inexperienced women would yield to what came under the guise of tender
solicitude, and no doubt eased or banished pain, which all of us avoid
when possible; and the pain connected with motherhood is a thing in awe of
which the most practised physicians admit themselves almost stunned.
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