ghted lamp as compared
with the time when it was blank. I'm not enough in her confidence to
know exactly what has wrought the change, so that I can only guess. It
seems to me the same thing that has given the mother a new view of life,
only that Rosie has probably come to it by another way. They're
strangely alike, those two--each so tense, so strong, so demanding, each
broken on the wheel, and each with that something firm and fine in the
grain to which the wheel can do no more than impart a higher _patina_ of
polishing. They seem to me to bring down into our rather sugary life
some of the old, narrow, splendidly austere New England qualities that
have almost passed away and to make them bloom--bloom, that is, as the
portulacca blooms, in a parched soil where any other plant would bake,
and yet with an almost painfully vivid brilliancy. Doesn't George
Meredith say in one of his books--is it _The Egoist_?--that the light of
the soul should burn upward? Well, that's what it seems to do in
them--to burn upward with a persistent glow, in spite of conditions that
might reasonably put it out."

"The old man is a mystery to me," she wrote later, "chiefly because it
is so impossible to connect him with any of the things we fear. He
seemed so small and shrunken and harmless as he sat on the portico
yesterday morning, drinking his coffee and munching a slice of toast,
that he appealed to me only as something to be taken care of. That
sinister element which I've seen in him of late had gone altogether,
leaving nothing but his old, faded, dreamy mildness, contented and
appeased. That is the really uncanny thing, that he seems _satisfied_.
He showed no fear of us at all, nor the slightest nervousness, not even
when Thor came. Thor was startled to see him there at first, but I
managed to whisper a word or two in French, so that he went straight up
to Fay and shook hands. I was glad of that. It put us in the right
attitude--that of not trying to find a victim or looking for revenge."

Before adding her next paragraph she weighed its subject-matter
pensively. It was not necessary to her letter; it was nothing her mother
was obliged to know. She decided to say it, however, from an instinct
resembling that of self-preservation. If her mother were ever to hear
anything....

"Thor saw Rosie, too. He was coming down-stairs from taking a bath just
as she was in the hall going away. It was the first time he'd seen her
since before we were