r and
service, home and the wonderful charge of little lives,--the "pure
religion breathing household laws" that guided and perfected the
whole,--these were not to be bought, they were only to be prayed for,
worked for, bravely won.

"God has been very good to me," Margaret said to herself very
seriously; and in her old childish fashion she made some new resolves.
From now on, she thought, with a fervor that made it seem half
accomplished, she would be a very different woman. If joy came, she
would share it as far as she could; if sorrow, she would show her
mother that her daughter was not all unworthy of her. To-morrow, she
thought, she would go and see Julie. Dear old Ju, whose heart was so
full of the little Margaret! Margaret had a sudden tender memory of
the days when Theodore and Duncan and Rob were all babies in turn. Her
mother would gather the little daily supply of fresh clothes from
bureau and chest every morning, and carry the little bath-tub into the
sunny nursery window, and sit there with only a bobbing downy head and
waving pink angers visible from the great warm bundle of bath
apron.... Ju would be doing that now.

And she had sometimes wished, or half formed the wish, that she and
Bruce bad been the only ones--! Yes, came the sudden thought, but it
wouldn't have been Bruce and Margaret, after all, it would have been
Bruce and Charlie.

Good God! That was what women did, then, when they denied the right of
life to the distant, unwanted, possible little person! Calmly,
constantly, in all placid philosophy and self-justification, they kept
from the world--not only the troublesome new baby, with his tears and
his illnesses, his merciless exactions, his endless claim on mind and
body and spirit--but perhaps the glowing beauty of a Rebecca, the
buoyant indomitable spirit of a Ted, the sturdy charm of a small
Robert, whose grip on life, whose energy and ambition were as strong
as Margaret's own!

Margaret stirred uneasily, frowned in the dark. It seemed perfectly
incredible, it seemed perfectly impossible that if Mother had had only
the two--and how many thousands of women didn't have that!--she,
Margaret, a pronounced and separate entity, travelled, ambitious, and
to be the wife of one of the world's great men, might not have been
lying here in the summer night, rich in love and youth and beauty
and her dreams!

It was all puzzling, all too big for her to understand. But she could
do what Mother did,