gs which
had seemed impossible before. She was in that moment of a woman's life
which has a certain pathos for the intelligent witness, when, having
reared her children and outgrown the more incessant cares of her
motherhood, she sometimes reverts to her girlish impulses and ideals,
and confronts the remaining opportunities of life with a joyful hope
unknown to our heavier and sullener sex in its later years. It is this
peculiar power of rejuvenescence which perhaps makes so many women
outlive their husbands, who at the same age regard this world as an
accomplished fact. Mrs. Kenton had kept up their reading long after
Kenton found himself too busy or too tired for it; and when he came
from his office at night and fell asleep over the book she wished him to
hear, she continued it herself, and told him about it. When Ellen began
to show the same taste, they read together, and the mother was not
jealous when the father betrayed that he was much prouder of his
daughter's culture than his wife's. She had her own misgivings that she
was not so modern as Ellen, and she accepted her judgment in the case of
some authors whom she did not like so well.

She now went about not only to all the places where she could make
Ellen's amusement serve as an excuse, but to others when she could not
coax or compel the melancholy girl. She was as constant at matinees
of one kind as Boyne at another sort; she went to the exhibitions of
pictures, and got herself up in schools of painting; she frequented
galleries, public and private, and got asked to studio teas; she went to
meetings and conferences of aesthetic interest, and she paid an easy
way to parlor lectures expressive of the vague but profound ferment
in women's souls; from these her presence in intellectual clubs was
a simple and natural transition. She met and talked with interesting
people, and now and then she got introduced to literary people. Once,
in a book-store, she stood next to a gentleman leaning over the same
counter, whom a salesman addressed by the name of a popular author, and
she remained staring at him breathless till he left the place. When she
bragged of the prodigious experience at home, her husband defied her to
say how it differed from meeting the lecturers who had been their guests
in Tuskingum, and she answered that none of them compared with this
author; and, besides, a lion in his own haunts was very different from
a lion going round the country on exhibition