applied it to women whose children had all married and left
them.

"Poor Matilda! She is restless and dissatisfied, and she doesn't
understand that it is because she has outlived her usefulness." At that
time "poor Matilda" had seemed to her an old woman--but, perhaps, she
wasn't in reality much over forty. How soon women grew old a generation
ago! Why, she felt as young to-day as she did the morning on which she
was married. She felt as young, and yet her hair was greying, her face
was wrinkled, and, like poor Matilda, she had outlived her usefulness.
While she stood there that peculiar sensation which comes to women when
their youth is over--the sensation of a changed world--took possession
of her. She felt that life was slipping, slipping past her, and that she
was left behind like a bit of the sentiment or the law of the last
century. Though she still felt young, it was not with the youth of
to-day. She had no part in the present; her ideals were the ideals of
another period; even her children had outgrown her. She saw now with a
piercing flash of insight, so penetrating, so impersonal, that it seemed
the result of some outside vision rather than of her own uncritical
judgment, that life had treated her as it treats those who give, but
never demand. She had made the way too easy for others; she had never
exacted of them; she had never held them to the austerity of their
ideals. Then the illumination faded as if it had been the malicious act
of a demon, and she reproached herself for allowing such thoughts to
enter her mind for an instant.

"I don't know what can be the matter with me. I never used to brood. I
wonder if it can be my time of life that makes me so nervous and
apprehensive?"

For so long she had waited for some definite point of time, for the
children to begin school, for them to finish school, for Harry to go off
to college, for Lucy to be married, that now, when she realized that
there was nothing to expect, nothing to prepare for, her whole nature,
with all the multitudinous fibres which had held her being together,
seemed suddenly to relax from its tension. To be sure, Oliver would come
home for a time at least after his rehearsals were over, Jenny would
return for as much of the holidays as her philanthropic duties
permitted, and, if she waited long enough, Harry would occasionally pay
her a visit. They all loved her; not one of them, she told herself,
would intentionally neglect her--but not o