in the rectory, and her mother, with hair that
still shone like satin, rocking back and forth in the black wicker chair
with the sagging bottom. She saw her kneeling on the old frayed red and
blue drugget, her skirt pinned up at the back of her waist, while she
bathed her daughter's scratched and aching feet in the oblong tin
foot-tub. She saw her, as beautiful as an angel, in church on Sunday
mornings, her worshipful eyes lifted to the pulpit, an edge of
tinted light falling on the open prayer-book in her hand. She saw
her, thin and stooping, a shadow of all that she had once
been--waiting--waiting----She had always been there. It was impossible
to realize that a time could ever come when she would not be there--and
now she was gone!

And behind all the images, all the impressions, the stubborn thought
persisted that this was life--that one could never escape it--that
whatever happened, one must come back to it at the last. "I have my
children still left--but for my children I could not live!" she thought,
dropping on her knees by the bedside, and hiding her face in the grey
wrapper.

* * * * *

After this it seemed to her that she ceased to live except in the lives
of her children, and her days passed so evenly, so monotonously, that
she only noticed their flight when one of the old people in Dinwiddie
remarked to her with a certain surprise: "You've almost a grown
daughter now, Jinny," or "Harry will soon be getting as big as his
father. Have you decided where you will send him to college?" She was
not unhappy--had she ever stopped to ask herself the question, she would
probably have answered, "If only mother and father were living, I should
be perfectly satisfied"; yet in spite of her assurances, there existed
deep down in her--so deep that her consciousness had never fully grasped
the fact of its presence--a dumb feeling that something was missing out
of life, that the actuality was a little less bright, a little less
perfect than it had appeared through the rosy glamour of her virgin
dreams. Was this "something missing" merely one of the necessary
conditions of mortal existence? Or was there somewhere on the earth that
stainless happiness which she had once believed her marriage would bring
to her? "I should be perfectly satisfied if only----" she would
sometimes say in the night, and then check herself before she had ended
the sentence. The lack, real as it was, was still too for