y kept all these things in her
heart.' The minister said that it wasn't only Mary who did this, but
ordinary women, so often. And I know from myself how true it is. You see
a woman all dressed up at a party, laughing with the others, dancing
perhaps, and she'll be saying inside of herself, 'If baby had lived,
he'd have been three years old.' Or thirteen, or thirty. I've no doubt
it goes on as long as she lives. And she can see him before her just as
plain, as he would have been.... My baby would have been five last
October."

Gerald remembered how sweet he had always thought it of her to wish to
stop and fondle little children, often wee beggars, stuffing little
grimy fists with pennies, not avoiding to touch soiled little cheeks
with her clean gloves. He had attributed this propensity to a simple
womanly talent for motherliness.

"I've got this to be thankful for," she came out again from silence,
farther down along the line of her meditations, "that he did live for a
few hours. I've got a son, just as much as if he'd grown to be a man."
She was dry-eyed, almost joyful in this.

"Yes, yes," hurried Gerald, consolingly; "that's what you must always
think of--that and not the other things. You must lay hold of that
thought and feel rich in it. But hear me, dear friend--me, trying to
suggest ways to you of being brave and cheerful! You, who do from
god-given temperament what I can only see as a right aim of aspiration,
by light of a certain philosophy arrived at in my own way, through my
own experiences. Philosophy is not the right word, either; the feeling I
have is mainly esthetic. In order not to be too unhappy in this world,
in order to have a little serenity, we must forgive everything, Aurora;
that is what I have clearly seen. It's the only way. We must forgive
events just as we forgive persons. And we must love life. I who so much
of the time hate life, yet know better. We must love it as we must love
our enemies. The wherefore is a mystery, but peace of heart and beauty
of life are involved with doing it. We mustn't mind being wounded,
crucified. We mustn't mind anything, Aurora! We mustn't be angry, the
gestures of it are ugly. I, who am always being angry, who sometimes
groan aloud my thoughts are so blasphemously bitter, I am telling you
what I at bottom know. The game is so unfair, it calls for magnanimity
on our part to stake handsomely and lose patiently. Patience, that's it!
We must be patient--patient a