; the fingers were as tapering as ever
and the palm as pink, but--there was a something that reminded her of
that plate of old china. She might be like a bit of old china, but she
was not ready to be laid upon the shelf, not even to be paid a price for
and be admired! She was in the full rush of her working days. Awhile ago
her friends had all addressed her as "Prudence," but now, she was not
aware when it began or how, she was "Miss Prudence" to every one who was
not within the nearest circle of intimacy. Not "Prudie" or "Prue" any
more. She had not been "Prudie" since her father and mother died, and not
"Prue" since she had lost that friend twenty years ago.

In ten short years she would be fifty years old, and fifty was half a
century: old enough to be somebody's grandmother. Was she not the bosom
friend of somebody's grandmother to-day? Laura Harrowgate, her friend
and schoolmate, not one year her senior, was the grandmother of
three-months-old Laura. Was it possible that she herself did not belong
to "the present generation," but to a generation passed away? She had no
daughter to give place to, as Laura had, no husband to laugh at her
wrinkles and gray hairs, as Laura had, and to say, "We're growing old
together." If it were only "together" there would be no sadness in it.
But would she want it to be such a "together" as certain of her friends
shared?

Laura Harrowgate was a grandmother, but still she would gush over that
plate from Holland two centuries old, buy a bracket for it and exhibit it
to her friends. A hand-glass did not make _her_ dolorous. A few years
since she would have rebelled against what the hand-glass revealed; but,
to-day, she could not rebel against God's will; assuredly it _was_ his
will for histories to be written in faces. Would she live a woman's life
and adorn herself with a baby's face? Had not her face been moulded by
her life? Had she stopped thinking and working ten years ago she might,
to-day, have looked at the face she looked at ten years ago. No, she
demurred, not a baby's face, but--then she laughed aloud at herself--was
not her fate the common fate of all? Who, among her friends, at forty
years of age, was ever taken, or mistaken, for twenty-five or thirty? And
if _she_ were, what then? Would her work be worth more to the world?
Would the angels encamp about her more faithfully or more lovingly? And,
then, was there not a face "marred"? Did he live his life upon the earth
with