uth which is to stand out bold and incontestable
may at first suggest itself so faintly through the dream as to be
called a phantom of the imagination. "True," she said. "And fine. And
equally true and fine that there's just as much to fight for now as
there ever was."

"Oh yes," murmured Mrs. Prescott, "we must still have the army, of
course."

"The fighting's not in the army," said Katie, to herself rather than to
her friend.

The older woman sighed. "I'm afraid I don't understand you, Katie." After
a pause she added, sadly: "Something seems happening in the world that is
driving older people and younger people apart."

Katie turned to her affectionately. "Oh, no."

But more affectionately than convincingly. Mrs. Prescott looked at her
wistfully: so strong, so buoyant, so fearless and so fine; she felt an
impulse to keep her, though for what--from what--she would not have been
able to say.

"Katie dear," she said gently, "I get a glimpse of what you mean in
there still being things to fight for. You mean new ideas; new things. I
know you're stirred by something. I feel your enthusiasm; it shines from
your face. Enthusiasm is a splendid thing in the young, Katie. In any of
us. New things there always are to fight for, of course. But, dear
Katie--the old things? Those beautiful _old_ things which the
generations have left us? Things fought for, tested, mellowed by our
fathers and mothers, and their fathers and mothers? Aren't they a little
too precious, too hardly won, too freighted with memories to be lightly
cast aside?"

Katie looked at her friend's face, itself so incontestably the gift of
the generations. It made vivid her own mother's face, and that her own
struggle. "I don't think," she said tremulously, "that you are justified
in saying they are 'lightly' cast aside."

They were silent, looking off at the land which was breaking through the
mists, responding in their different ways to the different things it was
saying to them.

"It seems to me," Mrs. Prescott began uncertainly, "that it is not for
women--particularly women to whom they have come as directly as to you
and me--to cast them off at all. We seem to be in strange days. Days of
change. To me, Katie, it seems that the work for the women--_our_
women--is in preserving those things, dear things left to us, holding
them safe and unharmed through the destroying days of change."

She had grown more sure of herself in speaking.

The last came