Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/365

 Again Jamie took his medicine. The taste of it was bitter on his tongue, because he was not a “hound.” He never had been. He had not the smallest obligation to the woman before him, other than the obligation that any man owes all women to love them honestly, to care for them gently, to respect their bodies as the vessels through which the world must be populated. That was a thing that had been hammered into him from the hour that he was old enough even remotely to understand its meaning. He must always take care of the women. He must always be polite to the women. He must always be kind to them. They must be taken care of because they were to make homes; they were to mother little children. They must be respected. They were the vessels that contained the seeds of life. From their loins must come the presidents and the senators, the governors and the businessmen, the captains and sailors and soldiers and the tillers of the soil and the ministers who filled the pulpits and the teachers who moulded the minds of youth in our schools.

Here lay a woman dying; dying in youth; dying in beauty; dying, in her own thought of herself, in shame, in scorching anguish, because some man, somewhere, had held her body lightly and violated it and consigned it to months of mental suffering, to hours of pain-racked anguish, to the loneliness of unloved death. Jamie reeled on his feet and the nurse thrust a chair under him.

She looked at him penetratingly and then she said deliberately: “Doctor, there’s something about this I don’t