ure and in the sunset
of classic paintings.

The longer Margaret lived with her old mother, the less she valued the
so-called "opportunities" she had missed. Coming out of her mother's
world of memories, there seemed something small, even common, about the
younger generation to which she belonged,--something lacking in
significance and dignity.

For example, it had been her dream, as it is the dream of every true
woman, to be a mother herself: and yet, somehow--though she would not
admit it in so many words--when her young married sisters came with
their babies, there was something about their bustling and complacent
domesticity that seemed to make maternity bourgeois. She had not dreamed
of being a mother like that. She was convinced that her old mother had
never been a mother like that. "They seem more like wet-nurses than
mothers," she said to herself, with her wicked wit.

Was there, she asked herself, something in realization that inevitably
lost you the dream? Was to incarnate an ideal to materialize it? Did the
finer spirit of love necessarily evaporate like some volatile essence
with marriage? Was it better to remain on idealistic spectator such as
she--than to run the risks of realization?

She was far too beautiful, and had declined too many offers of
commonplace marriage, for such questioning to seem the philosophy of
disappointment. Indeed, the more she realized her own situation, the
more she came to regard what others considered her sacrifice to her
mother as a safeguard against the risk of a mediocre domesticity.
Indeed, she began to feel a certain pride, as of a priestess, in the
conservation of the dignity of her nature. It is better to be a vestal
virgin than--some mothers.

And, after all, the maternal instinct of her nature found an ideal
outlet in her brother's children--the two little motherless girls who
came every year to spend their holidays with their grandmother and their
aunt Margaret.

Margaret had seen but little of their mother, but her occasional
glimpses of her had left her with a haloed image of a delicate,
spiritual face that grew more and more Madonna-like with memory. The
nimbus of the Divine Mother, as she herself had dreamed of her, had
seemed indeed to illumine that grave young face.

It pleased her imagination to take the place of that phantom mother,
herself--a phantom mother. And who knows but that such dream-children,
as she called those two little girls, were more sa