t comes home to
us that there are the Dark Ages in the history of a woman exactly as
there were the Dark Ages in the history of Europe. Life goes on in
those Dark Ages, but it doesn't feel the call to articulate itself, to
leave a record of its experiences. And that strikes me, as I sit here
and think of it, as about the deepest tragedy that can overtake
anything on this earth. Nothing, after all, is sadder than silence,
the silence of dead civilizations and dead cities and dead souls. And
nothing is more costly. For beauty itself, in actual life, passes
away, but beauty lovingly recorded by mortal hands endures and goes
down to our children. And I stop writing, at that word of "children,"
for miraculously, as I repeat it, I see it cut a window in the
unlighted house of my heart. And that window is the bright little
Gothic oriel which will always be golden and luminous with love and
will always send the last shadow scurrying away from the mustiest
corner of my tower of life. I have my Dinkie and my Poppsy, and
nothing can take them away from me. It's on them that I pin my hope.

_Sunday the Seventeenth_

I've been thinking a great deal over what's happened this last week or
so. And I've been trying to reorganize my life, the same as you put a
house to rights after a funeral. But it wasn't a well-ordered funeral,
in this case, and I was denied even the tempered satisfaction of the
bereaved after the finality of a smoothly conducted burial. For
nothing has been settled. It's merely that Time has been trying to
encyst what it can not absorb. I felt, for a day or two, that I had
nothing much to live for. I felt like a feather-weight who'd faced a
knock-out. I saw Pride go to the mat, and take the count, and if I was
dazed, for a while, I suppose it was mostly convalescence from shock.
Then I tightened my belt, and reminded myself that it wasn't the first
wallop Fate had given me, and remembered that in this life you have to
adjust yourself to your environment or be eliminated from the game.
And life, I suppose, has tamed me, as a man who once loved me said it
would do. The older I get the more tolerant I try to be, and the more
I know of this world the more I realize that Right is seldom all on
one side and Wrong on the other. It's a matter of give and take, this
problem of traveling in double-harness. I can even smile a little, as
I remember that college day in my teens when Matilda-Anne and Katrina
and Fanny-Rai