mply the
unspoken relation, behind, above, below. All this she had taken for
granted, like mother-love and her own dawning womanhood. And now Dick,
the chief corner-stone of her edifice, was torn away, and the whole airy
structure toppled and dissolved.

"I've been assuming all this," she said to herself, "and marriage isn't
a thing to take for granted. Shouldn't I have resented it if Dick had
appropriated me as though I belonged to him and had lost my freedom of
choice? I've been unfair to him. And now--if I should never marry--there
are surely plenty of good things left in the world. But are there?"

Madeline had always been characterized by those who knew her as lovely
and placid. And why not? What else should life draw out of a girl of
normal nature, surrounded by protecting love, given the good things of
life as by right, shielded from the knowledge of evil, never facing a
problem more exciting than those of Euclid. But now something began to
stir in the unknown depths of her nature. For the first time in her life
she had had a blow. There rose before her a vision of endless
maidenhood. She saw herself as she had seen other women--uninteresting
women, she had thought them. Now they seemed to her like
tragedies--women whose lives did not count, either to themselves or to
the world, middle-aged, somber, unrelated. To be childless, to eat and
dress and wear the semblance of womanhood, even to play a little part in
society, and yet to be but half a woman! To be no link in the
generations! This was unendurable. The first demand of every soul is for
life, and yet life is life only when it is part of the future. To live
oneself one must live in others. All the mother hidden in the depths of
her rose and cried out against any destiny that shut her out from the
great stream of humanity.

"I shall be a side-eddy in the current. I shall grow stagnant and slimy
and lead nowhere. And the rushing waters will go leaping and laughing
past."

She got up and moved restlessly up and down the room. She looked again
out of the window at the sober end of the winter day. In the tree
branches that clattered outside, her eyes fell on an empty nest.

"And am I to be such a thing?" she said. "Surely all the world must bow
down in pity for the solitary woman." Some half-forgotten lines came
back to her:

"Mine ear is full of the rocking of cradles.
For a single cradle, saith Nature, I would give every one of my graves."

By h