ours,

"Henry T. Goward."

IX. THE MOTHER, by Edith Wyatt

I am sure that I shall surprise no mother of a large family when I say
that this hour is the first one I have spent alone for thirty years. I
count it, alone. For while I am driving back in the runabout along the
six miles of leafy road between the hospital and Eastridge with mother
beside me, she is sound asleep under the protection of her little hinged
black sunshade, still held upright. She will sleep until we are at home;
and, after our anxious morning at the hospital, I am most grateful to
the fortune sending me this lucid interval, not only for thinking over
what has occurred in the last three days, but also for trying to focus
clearly for myself what has happened in the last week, since Elizabeth
went on the 5.40 to New York; since Charles followed Elizabeth; since
Maria, under Dr. Denbigh's mysteriously required escort, followed
Charles; since Tom followed Maria; and since Cyrus, with my dear girl,
followed Tom.

On the warm afternoon before Elizabeth left, as I walked past her open
door, with Lena, and carrying an egg-nog to Peggy, I could not avoid
hearing down the whole length of the hall a conversation carried on in
clear, absorbed tones, between my sister and Alice.

"Did I understand you to say," said Elizabeth, in an assumption of
indifference too elaborate, I think, to deceive even her niece, "that
this Mr. Wilde you mention is now living in New York?"

"Oh yes. He conducts all the art-classes at the Crafts Settlement. He
encouraged Lorraine's sisters in their wonderful work. I would love to
go into it myself."

Lorraine's sisters and her circle once entertained me at tea in their
establishment when I visited Charles before his marriage, in New York.
They are extremely kind young women, ladies in every respect, who have a
workshop called "At the Sign of the Three-legged Stool." They seem to be
carpenters, as nearly as I can tell. They wear fillets and bright, loose
clothes; and they make very rough-hewn burnt-wood footstools and odd
settees with pieces of glass set about in them. It is all very puzzling.
When Charles showed me a candlestick one of the young ladies had made,
and talked to me about the decoration and the line, I could see that
it was very gracefully designed and nicely put together. But when he
noticed that in the wish to be perfectly open-minded to his point of
view I was looking very attentively at a queer, un