try to give Elly the unknowable answer to that dark question? Was there
any deep spiritual reality which counted at all, which one human being
could give to another? Did we really live on desert islands, cut off so
wholly from each other by the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea? And if we
did, why break one's heart in the vain effort to do the impossible, to
get from human beings what they could not give?

Her heart ached in an old bitterness at the doubt. Did her children . . .
could they . . . give her the love she wanted from them, in answer to her
gift of her life to them? They were already beginning to go away from
her, to be estranged from her, to shut her out of their lives, to live
their lives with no place for her in them.

She sat there on the old trunk and saw the endless procession of parents
and children passing before her, the children so soon parents, all
driven forward by what they could not understand, yearning and starving
for what was not given them, all wrapped and dimmed in the twilight of
their doubt and ignorance. Where were they going? And why? So many of
them, so many!

Her humbled spirit was prostrate before their mystery, before the
vastness of the whole, of which she and her children were only a part, a
tiny, lowly part.

With this humbling sense of the greatness of the whole, something
swollen and sore in her heart gave over its aching, as though a
quieting hand had been laid on it. She drew a long breath. Oh, from what
did it come, this rest from that sore bitterness?

It came from this, that she had somehow been shown that what she wanted
was not love from her children for herself. That was trying to drive a
bargain to make them pay for something they had never asked to have.
What she wanted was not to get love, to get a place in their lives for
herself, to get anything from them, but to give them all that lay in her
to give. If that was what she wanted, why, nothing, nothing could take
it away. And it was truly . . . in this hour of silence and searching . . .
she saw that it was truly what she wanted. It was something in her which
had grown insensibly to life and strength, during all those uncounted
hours of humble service to the children. And it was something golden and
immortal in her poor, flawed, human heart.

* * * * *

A warm bright wave of feeling swept over her . . . there, distinct and
rounded against the shadowy confused procession of abstra