Write me what you think of the news. I know but write me anyhow.

I'll get it before we start home and I can be reading it over all the
time on the tram.

Your always loving

VIRGIL.

The sound of her mother's diligent scrubbing in the hall came back
slowly to Alice's hearing, as she restored the letter to the packet,
wrapped the packet in its muslin covering, and returned it to the
drawer. She had remained upon her knees while she read the letter; now
she sank backward, sitting upon the floor with her hands behind her, an
unconscious relaxing for better ease to think. Upon her face there had
fallen a look of wonder.

For the first time she was vaguely perceiving that life is everlasting
movement. Youth really believes what is running water to be a permanent
crystallization and sees time fixed to a point: some people have dark
hair, some people have blond hair, some people have gray hair. Until
this moment, Alice had no conviction that there was a universe before
she came into it. She had always thought of it as the background of
herself: the moon was something to make her prettier on a summer night.

But this old letter, through which she saw still flickering an ancient
starlight of young love, astounded her. Faintly before her it revealed
the whole lives of her father and mother, who had been young, after
all--they REALLY had--and their youth was now so utterly passed from
them that the picture of it, in the letter, was like a burlesque of
them. And so she, herself, must pass to such changes, too, and all that
now seemed vital to her would be nothing.

When her work was finished, that afternoon, she went into her father's
room. His recovery had progressed well enough to permit the departure
of Miss Perry; and Adams, wearing one of Mrs. Adams's wrappers over his
night-gown, sat in a high-backed chair by a closed window. The weather
was warm, but the closed window and the flannel wrapper had not sufficed
him: round his shoulders he had an old crocheted scarf of Alice's; his
legs were wrapped in a heavy comfort; and, with these swathings about
him, and his eyes closed, his thin and grizzled head making but a slight
indentation in the pillow supporting it, he looked old and little and
queer.

Alice would have gone out softly, but without opening his eyes, he spoke
to her: "Don't go, dearie. Come sit with the old man a little while."

She brought a chair near his. "I thought you were napping."

"No. I