maternal instinct; but wherever it came from, there was one thing of which one could be as sure as one could be sure of all Sara's impassioned desires, and that was its reality.
Taking it all together, Alice decided that many of Sara's most inexplicable wishes flowed from the maternal instinct, and she wondered why civilization has tried to chain and check and train the instinct to love, and why through the ages it has dug deep channels, the channel of marriage for instance, into which it has attempted to divert its turbulent waters, while its sister instinct, equally ferocious, with equal powers of destruction, the maternal instinct, has been allowed to roam unchecked. It has no conventions. We do all we can to prevent the instinct to love from appearing prematurely among our children and young people; but let the maternal instinct rear its head, however young and in whatever extraordinary forms, and we pamper it.
Only thus and so, civilization has agreed, shall love receive our sanction. For the good of the race we will try and see that it walks within such and such appointed limits—at least as much as we can; but to the maternal instinct everything is allowed, unseasonable appearances and unlovely manifestations. All sorts of vagaries of young and old we explain by saying "She felt the maternal instinct." Why chains and conventions and inhibitions and taboos for one, and a whole world of license for the other? Why this complacent fostering of the maternal instinct in very little girls until we have emotional scenes over dolls, was the question that Alice now increasingly put to the universe.
A cataclysm that happened not long after the Kewpies made Alice wish that civilization had as little considered cultivating the maternal instinct in the young as it has the instinct to love. In other words Alice wished
