sha'n't hurry him back."

She looked straight into her mother's anxious eyes, saw them clear, saw
a smile come--and took a deep breath of relief. If there was one thing
that she had to put up the most strenuous fight to avoid, in her
present chaotic state of mind, it was a direct question as to her life
with Martin. Of all people, her mother must be left in the belief that
she was happy. Pride demanded that, even to the extent of lying. It was
hard luck to be caught by her mother, at the very moment when she was
standing among all the debris of her kid's ideas, among all the broken
beams of carelessness, and the shattered panes of high spirits.

She was thankful that her mother was not one of those aggressive,
close-questioning women, utterly devoid of sensitiveness and delicacy
who are not satisfied until they have forced open all the secret
drawers of the mind and stuck the contents on a bill file,--one of
those hard-bosomed women who stump into church as they stump into a
department store with an air of "Now then, what can you show me that's
new," who go about with a metaphorical set of burglar's tools in a
large bag with which to break open confidences and who have no faith in
human nature.

And with a sudden sense of gratitude she turned to the woman whom she
had always accepted as a fact, an institution, and looked at her with
new eyes, a new estimate and a new emotion. The little, loving, gentle,
anxious woman with the capacity of receiving impressions from external
objects that amounted to a gift but with a reticence of so fine and
tender a quality that she seemed always to stand on tiptoes on the
delicate ground of people's feelings, was HERS, was her mother. The
word burst into a new meaning, blossomed into a new truth. She had been
accepted all these years,--loved, in a sort of way; obeyed, perhaps,
expected to do things and provide things and make things easy, and here
she stood more needed, at the moment when she imagined that the need of
her had passed, than at any other time of her motherhood.

In a flash Joan understood all this and its paradox, looked all the way
back along the faithful, unappreciated years, and being no longer a
child was stirred with a strange maternal fellow feeling that started
her tears. Nature is merciless. Everything is sacrificed to youth.
Birds build their nests and rear their young and are left as soon as
wings are ready. Women marry and bear children and bring them up with