st one rose on your table."

"Yes"--she returned eagerly--"isn't it a beauty! I spent half an hour
this morning looking for the best and most perfect rose in the garden,
and there it is!"

She was now all alight with her idea, and I saw her, as we sometimes see
our oldest friends, as though I had not seen her before. She was that
phenomenon of the modern world--the free woman of forty-five.

When a woman reaches the old age of youth, the years between forty and
forty-five, she either surrenders or revolts. In the older days in
America it was nearly always surrender. Those women of a past
generation bore many children: how many graves there are in our hill
cemeteries of women of forty to fifty who died leading families of five
or eight or ten children! How many second and third wives there were,
often with second and third families. Or if they did not die, how
terribly they toiled, keeping the house, clothing the children, cooking
the food. Or if they bore no children, yet they were bound down by a
thousand chains of convention and formality.

But in these days we have a woman of forty-five who has not surrendered.
She is a vigorous, experienced, active-minded human being, just
beginning to look restlessly around her and take a new interest in the
world. Such a woman was Mary Starkweather; and this was her first
revolt.

"You cannot imagine," she was saying, "what a joy it has been to
unaccumulate! To get rid of things! To select."

"To become an artist in life!"

"Yes! At last! What a lot of perfectly worthless trash accumulates
around us. Not beautiful, not even useful! And it is not only the lives
of the well-to-do that are choked and cluttered with things. I wish you
could see the house of our Polish farmer. He's been saving money, and
filling up his house with perfectly worthless ornaments--ornate clocks,
gorgeous plush furniture, impossible rugs--and yet he is only doing what
we are all doing on a more elaborate scale."

I laughed.

"That reminds me of a family of squirrels that lives in an oak tree on
my hill," I said. "I am never tired of watching them. In the fall they
work desperately, stealing all the hickory nuts and chestnuts on my
neighbour Horace's back pastures, five times as many as they need, and
then they forget, half the time, where they've hidden them. We're all
more or less in the squirrel stage of civilization."

"Yes," she responded. "There are my books! I gathered up books for
years,