r-long toil at the ironing-board.

She skipped a stanza that she knew was hopelessly beyond her, and tried
again:

"The dusk of the greenhouse is luminous yet
With quivers of opal and tremors of gold;
For the sun is at rest, and the light from the west,
Like delicate wine that is mellow and old,

"Flushes faintly the brow of a naiad that stands In the spray of a
fountain, whose seed-amethysts Tremble lightly a moment on bosom and
hands, Then dip in their basin from bosom and wrists."

"It's beautiful, just beautiful," she sighed. And then, appalled at the
length of all the poem, at the volume of the mystery, she rolled the
manuscript and put it away. Again she dipped in the drawer, seeking the
clue among the cherished fragments of her mother's hidden soul.

This time it was a small package, wrapped in tissue paper and tied with
ribbon. She opened it carefully, with the deep gravity and circumstance
of a priest before an altar. Appeared a little red-satin Spanish
girdle, whale-boned like a tiny corset, pointed, the pioneer finery of
a frontier woman who had crossed the plains. It was hand-made after the
California-Spanish model of forgotten days. The very whalebone had been
home-shaped of the raw material from the whaleships traded for in hides
and tallow. The black lace trimming her mother had made. The triple
edging of black velvet strips--her mother's hands had sewn the stitches.

Saxon dreamed over it in a maze of incoherent thought. This was
concrete. This she understood. This she worshiped as man-created gods
have been worshiped on less tangible evidence of their sojourn on earth.

Twenty-two inches it measured around. She knew it out of many
verifications. She stood up and put it about her waist. This was part of
the ritual. It almost met. In places it did meet. Without her dress it
would meet everywhere as it had met on her mother. Closest of all, this
survival of old California-Ventura days brought Saxon in touch. Hers was
her mother's form. Physically, she was like her mother. Her grit, her
ability to turn off work that was such an amazement to others, were
her mother's. Just so had her mother been an amazement to her
generation--her mother, the toy-like creature, the smallest and the
youngest of the strapping pioneer brood, who nevertheless had mothered
the brood. Always it had been her wisdom that was sought, even by the
brothers and sisters a dozen years her senior. Daisy, it was,