There was something tragic in this untidy and unconstrained fecundity; it was the abjection of a creature struggling on the border of nothingness and death, it was a kind of heroism of femaleness triumphing with its fecundity even over a deformity of nature, over the insufficiency of the male. But the progeny demonstrated the rightness of that maternal panic, that frenzy for giving birth, that exhausted itself in unsuccessful creatures, in an ephemeral generation of phantoms without blood or faces.
