mless to lend
itself to the precision of words; it belonged less to circumstances than
to the essential structure of life. And yet, as she put it to herself in
her rare moments of depression, she had so much to be thankful for! The
children grew stronger as they grew older--since Harry's attack of
diphtheria, indeed, there had been no serious illness in the family, and
as she approached middle-age, her terror of illness increased rather
than diminished. The children made up for much--they ought to have made
up for everything--and yet did they? There was no visible fault that she
could attribute to them. With her temperamental inability to see flaws,
she was accustomed to think of them as perfect children, as children
whom she would not change, had she the power, by so much as a hair or an
outline. They grew up, straight, fine, and fearless, full of the new
spirit, eager to test life, to examine facts, possessed by that
awakening feeling for truth which had always frightened her a little in
Susan. Vaguely, without defining the sensation, she felt that they were
growing beyond her, that she could no longer keep up with them, that,
every year, they were leaving her a little farther behind them. They
were fond of her, but she understood from something Jenny said one day,
that they had ceased to be proud of her. It was while they were looking
over an old photograph album of Susan's that, coming to a picture of
Virginia, taken the week before her wedding, Jenny cried out: "Why,
there's mother!" and slipped it out of the page.

"I never saw that before," Lucy said, leaning over with a laugh. "You
were so young when you married, mother, and you wore such tight sleeves,
and a bustle!"

"Would you ever have believed she was as pretty as that?" asked Jenny,
with the unconscious brutality of childhood.

"If you are ever as beautiful as your mother was, you may thank your
stars," said Susan dryly, and by the expression in her face Virginia
knew that she was thinking, "If that was my child, I'd slap her!"

Harry, who had been stuffing fruitcake on the sofa--sweets were his
weakness--rose suddenly and came over to the group.

"If you are ever as beautiful as she is now, you may thank your stars,
Miss Yellow Frisk!" he remarked crushingly.

It was a little thing--so little that it seemed ridiculous to think of
it as among the momentous happenings in a life--but with that
extraordinary proneness of the little to usurp the signific