timid little shoots. She was excited about the
things of which Annie talked--those new ideals of freedom--not so much
because they were new and daring and illumining things, as because they
did not come all alien. There was something from within to go out to
them. In that--not that there were interesting things she could have
from without--but that she, opened to the new stimulus, could become
something from within, was the real excitation, the joy of the new
promise was there. And this new stir, this promise of new satisfactions,
let her feel that her life was not all mapped out, designed ahead. She
went to sleep that night with a wonderful new feeling of there being as
much for her in life as she herself had power to take.

And she woke with that feeling; she was eager to be up, to be out in the
sunshine. Annie, she found, had gone early to town with her vegetables.
Ruth helped eleven-year-old Dorothy, the eldest child, get off for
school and walked with her to the schoolhouse half a mile down the road.
The little girl's shyness wore away and she chatted with Ruth about
school, about teachers and lessons and play. Ruth loved it; it seemed to
set the seal of a human relationship upon her new feeling. What a
wonderful thing for Annie to have these children! Today gladness in
there being children in the world went out past sorrow in her own
deprivation. The night before she had said to Annie, "You have your
children. That makes life worth while to you, doesn't it?" And Annie,
with that hard, swift look of being ruthless for getting at the
truth--for getting her feeling straight and expressing it truly, had
answered, "Not in itself. I mean, it's not all. I think much precious
life has gone dead under that idea of children being enough--letting
them be all. _We_ count--_I_ count! Just leaving life isn't all; living
it while we're here--that counts, too. And keeping open to it in more
than any one relationship. Suppose they, in their turn, have that idea;
then life's never really lived, is it?--always just passed on, always
_put off_." They had talked of that at some length. "Certainly I want my
children to have more than I have," Annie said. "I am working that they
may. But in that working for them I'm not going to let go of the fact
that I count too. Now's my only chance," she finished in that grim
little way as one not afraid to be hard.

Thinking back to that it seemed to Ruth a bigger mother feeling than the
old one.