Sacrifice

Dedicated readers of this blog--good Sunny Sunday evening to you, Uncle Chilli and Aunt Pep--will know of my admiration for the moral stakes put before us by Charlotte's Web. What Charlotte and Wilbur do for each other puts them in the top one percent on the holiness scale.
But wait a minute. Charlotte does go to a lot of trouble for Wilbur, knowing that if she doesn't, Wilbur will be slaughtered by Christmas. And Wilbur, in turn, saves her children by taking them home, while she lives out her last days and dies, alone. But that egg sac he takes so carefully home, and attends to so lovingly as time goes on, would have done just fine where Charlotte left it--attached safely to an out-of-the-way corner at the Fairgrounds. The spiders could hatch there as safely as in the doorway above Wilbur's pen at the farm.
Are the stakes, then, not quite so exalted as I claimed? Maybe Wilbur's not so noble, just lucky. But then I realize it's not the fact that matters--the fact that he didn't actually save her children--it's what it means that matters. He's maxed out his nobility, in other words, as Charlotte has. In his mind, he's saving her children, which is why when 511 out of 514 of them literally drift away when hatched, he's a little disappointed. But three stay. And some of their children will stay too, and Wilbur will live a long life in the company of Charlotte's daughters, and he'll be sure to tell them all about her.