Page:Complete Works of Count Tolstoy - 18.djvu/382

 "It is evident that this is not love, but egotism. But not a hand is raised to condemn them, the mothers of well-to-do families, for this egotism, when you consider what it is they suffer for the sake of their children's health, thanks again to the rôle these doctors play in our upper classes. It makes me shudder even now when I recall the life and the condition of my wife during those first years, when there were three or four children, and she was all absorbed in them. We led no life at all. It was an eternal danger, an escaping from it, a new impending danger, new desperate efforts, and a new salvation,—eternally the same condition as on a sinking ship. At times I thought that it was done on purpose, that she only pretended to be so anxious about the children, in order to vanquish me. It solved so enticingly and simply all the questions in her favour. It seemed to me at times that everything she said and did in such cases was done on purpose. But no, she really was all the time in terrible agony and pain about the children, their health and sicknesses. It was a trial for her and for me, too. Nor could she help suffering. Her attachment for her children, the animal necessity of feeding, fostering, defending them, was such as it is in the majority of women, but there was not that which animals have,—an absence of imagination and reason.

"A hen is not afraid of what might happen with her chick, does not know all the diseases which might befall it, does not know all the means with which people imagine they can save from disease and death. The young ones are no torment for the hen. She does for her chicks what is natural and pleasurable for her to do,—her young ones are a joy to her. When a chick becomes ill, her cares are quite definite: she warns and feeds it. Doing this, she knows that she is doing all that is necessary. If the chick dies, she does not ask herself why it has died, whither it has gone; she cackles for awhile, then stops