the housing and feeding of her husband and
family that her own personal ambitions, if she had any, were quite
lost sight of, and the actual outlines of her character were forgotten
by every one, herself included. If her busy day marched successfully
to nightfall; if darkness found her husband reading in his big chair,
the younger children sprawled safe and asleep in the shabby nursery,
the older ones contented with books or games, the clothes sprinkled,
the bread set, the kitchen dark and clean; Mrs. Paget asked no more
of life. She would sit, her overflowing work-basket beside her,
looking from one absorbed face to another, thinking perhaps of
Julie's new school dress, of Ted's impending siege with the dentist,
or of the old bureau up attic that might be mended for Bruce's room.
"Thank God we have all warm beds," she would say, when they all went
upstairs, yawning and chilly.

She had married, at twenty, the man she loved, and had found him
better than her dreams in many ways, and perhaps disappointing in
some few others, but "the best man in the world" for all that. That
for more than twenty years he had been satisfied to stand for nine
hours daily behind one dingy desk, and to carry home to her his
unopened salary envelope twice a month, she found only admirable.
Daddy was "steady," he was "so gentle with the children," he was
"the easiest man in the world to cook for." "Bless his heart, no
woman ever had less to worry over in her husband!" she would say,
looking from her kitchen window to the garden where he trained the
pea-vines, with the children's yellow heads bobbing about him. She
never analyzed his character, much less criticised him. Good and bad,
he was taken for granted; she was much more lenient to him than to
any of the children. She welcomed the fast-coming babies as gifts
from God, marvelled over their tiny perfectness, dreamed over the
soft relaxed little forms with a heart almost too full for prayer.
She was, in a word, old-fashioned, hopelessly out of the modern
current of thoughts and events. She secretly regarded her children
as marvellous, even while she laughed down their youthful conceit
and punished their naughtiness.

Thinking a little of all these things, as a girl with her own
wifehood and motherhood all before her does think, Margaret went
back to her hot luncheon. One o'clock found her at her desk,
refreshed in spirit by her little outburst, and much fortified
in body. The room was well