the highly technical steps of the sophisticated
dances taught her at the Krisiloff School. Her sturdy little legs were
trained at the practice bar. Her baby arms curved obediently above her
head or in fixed relation to the curve of her body in the dance. She
understood and carried into effect the French technical terms. It was
called gymnastic and interpretive dancing. There was about it none of
the spontaneity with which a child unconsciously endows impromptu dance
steps. But it was graceful and lovely. Hannah thought Joan a second
Pavlowa; took vast delight in watching her. Taking Joan and Peter to
these dancing classes was one of the duties that often devolved upon
her. In the children's early years Marcia had attended a child study
class twice a week and Hannah had more or less minded the two in their
mother's absence. The incongruity of this had never struck her. Or if it
had she had never mentioned it to Marcia. There were a good many things
she never mentioned to Marcia. Marcia was undoubtedly a conscientious
mother, thinking of her children, planning for her children, hourly:
their food, their clothes, their training, their manners, their
education. Asparagus; steak; French; health shoes; fingernails; dancing;
teeth; hair; curtseys.

"Train all the independence out of 'em," Hannah said sometimes, grimly.
Not to Marcia, though. She said it sometimes to her friends Julia Pierce
or Sarah Clapp, or even to Vinie Harding, the spinster of sixty, for all
three, including the spinster Vinie, who was a great-aunt, seemed to be
living much the same life that had fallen to Hannah Winter's lot.

Hyde Park was full of pretty, well-dressed, energetic young mothers who
were leaning hard upon the Hannah Winters of their own families. You saw
any number of grey-haired, modishly gowned grandmothers trundling
go-carts; walking slowly with a moist baby fist in their gentle clasp;
seated on park benches before which blue rompers dug in the sand or
gravel or tumbled on the grass. The pretty young mothers seemed very
busy, too, in another direction. They attended classes, played bridge,
marketed, shopped, managed their households. Some of them had gone in
for careers. None of them seemed conscious of the frequency with which
they said, "Mother, will you take the children from two to five this
afternoon?" Or, if they were conscious of it, they regarded it as a
natural and normal request. What are grandmothers for?

Hannah Winter love