This is the annotated version of the original eBook. We had tried to annotate this eBook by adding a summary of about 34,500 (approx.) words which consist of 50% to 60% of the original eBook at the end of the eBook in Red Fonts. Table of Contents added for easier navigation. You can read any chapter or the main summary directly with 1 click if you want to.
This Novel is strictly for adults. The Brief Summary of the eBook is as follows:- The business of the father, in all this incipient child-development, is to stand outside as a final authority and make the necessary adjustments. But there is a disease of idealism in the world, and we all are born with it. "Onward, Christian soldiers, towards the great terminus where bottles of sterilized milk for the babies are delivered at the bedroom windows by noiseless airplanes each morn, where the science of dentistry is so perfect that teeth are planted in a man's mouth without his knowing it, where twilight sleep is so delicious that every woman longs for her next confinement, and where nobody ever has to do anything except turn a handle now and then in a spirit of universal love—" That is the forward direction of the English-speaking race. And I must confess that I feel this self-same "accomplishment" of the fulfilled being is only a preparation for new responsibilities ahead, new unison in effort and conflict, the effort to make, with other men, a little new way into the future, and to break through the hedge of the many. But if the sun is the center of our infinite one in death with all the other after-death souls of the cosmos: and in that great central station of travel, the sun, we meet and mingle and change trains for the stars: then ought we to assume that the moon is likewise a meeting-place of dead souls. It is a circuit which in man travels up the right side, and down the left side of the body, to the earth's center. And that which cannot be fulfilled, perfected in the two individuals, that which cannot take fire into an individual life, this trickles down and is the seed of a new life, destined ultimately to fulfill that which the parents could not fulfill. But when once a woman does believe in her man, in the pioneer which he is, the pioneer who goes on ahead beyond her, into the darkness in front, and who may be lost to her forever in this darkness; when once she knows the pain and beauty of this belief, knows that the loneliness of waiting and following is inevitable, that it must be so; ah, then, how wonderful it is.
