et me have one to ride? Wouldn't you take me to London
sometimes, not to go to smart parties, but to see something of
interesting people as Angela and Beatrice do at Aunt Emmeline's, and see
plays and pictures and hear music? Wouldn't you take us abroad
sometimes? Should we have to live the whole year round in the country,
doing nothing and knowing nothing?"

Mrs. Clinton's hand stopped its gentle, caressing movement, and then
went on again. During the moment of pause she faced a crisis as vital as
that which Cicely had gone through. She had had just those desires in
her youth and she had stifled them. Could they be stifled--would it be
right to stifle them--in the daughter who had, perhaps, inherited them
from her?

"You asked me just now," she said, "whether I was happy. Yes, I am
happy. I have my dear ones around me, I have my religion, I have my
place in the world to fill. I should be very ungrateful if I were not
happy. But if you ask me whether the life I lead is exactly what it
would be if it rested only with me to order it--I think you know that it
isn't?"

"But why shouldn't it be, mother? Other women do the things they like,
and father and the boys do exactly what they like. If you have wanted
the same things that I want now, I say you ought to have had them."

"If I had had them, Cicely, I should not have found out one very great
thing--that happiness does not come from these things; it does not come
from doing what you like, even if what you like is good in itself. I
might almost say that it comes from not doing what you like. That is the
lesson that I have learned of life, and I am thankful that it has been
taught me."

Cicely was silent for a time. She seemed to see her mother, dear as she
had been to her, in a new light, with a halo of uncomplaining
self-sacrifice round her. Her face burned as she remembered how that
morning in church, and since, she had thought of her as one who had
bartered her independence for a life of dull luxury and stagnation. It
came upon her with a flash of insight that her mother was a woman of
strong intelligence, who had, consciously, laid her intellectual gifts
on the altar of duty, and found her reward in doing so. The thought
found ineffective utterance.

"Of course it is from you that Walter gets his brains," she said.

Mrs. Clinton did not reply to this. "You are very young to learn the
lesson," she said. "I am not sure--I don't think it is a lesson that
every on