the arts--the touching of other lives, drawing a music from long-disused
heart-strings, rekindling, reanimating, the torpid spirit. It was her
search for more _life_--richer, thicker, happier, more intense.

Her model was Joe's mother. It seemed to her that Joe's mother had met
life and conquered it, and so would never grow old. She never found the
older woman soured or bitter or enfeebled. Even about death there was no
flinching.

"Don't you think I know," said Joe's mother, "that there is something
precious in me that isn't going to go with the body? Just look at this
body! That's just what's happening already! I'm too young to die. And
besides I know one or two people whom I lost years ago--too precious to
be lost--I've faith in them."

This, then, is the greatest victory of life: to treat death as a mere
incident in the adventure; an emigration to a new country; a brief and
tragic "auf wiedersehen." It has its pang of parting, and its pain of
new birth--all birth is a struggle full of pain--but it is the only door
to the future. Well for Joe's mother that her hand was ready to grasp
the dark knob and turn it when the time came.

Once as she and Joe's mother were snatching a lunch together in the
kitchen, the elder woman spoke softly:

"Myra, you're a great girl!" (She persisted in calling Myra a girl,
though Myra kept telling her she was nearly thirty-three and old enough
to be dignified.) "What will I ever do without you when the strike is
over?"

Myra smiled.

"Is it as bad as that?"

"Yes, and getting worse, Myra!"

Myra flushed with joy.

"I'm glad. I'm very glad."

Joe's mother watched her a little.

"How have you been feeling, Myra?"

"I?--" Myra was surprised. "Oh, I'm all right! I haven't time to be
unwell."

"You really think you're all right, then?"

"Oh, I know it! This busy life is doing me good."

"It does most of us good." She changed the subject.

Myra felt, with great happiness, that she was coming into harmony with
Joe's mother. She would have been quite amazed, however, to know that
Joe's mother was secretly struggling to adjust herself. For Joe's mother
could not help thinking that the time might come when Joe and Myra would
marry, and she was schooling herself for this momentous change. She
kept telling herself: "There is no one in the world I ought to love more
than the woman that Joe loves and weds." And yet it was hard to release
her son, to take that life which had for