ipline of a hard if
happy life had brought her spiritual life in an unconsciously profound
form. She had shrunk from that discipline with all the force of her
nature, and in her girl's heart had vowed that she would never marry and
lead the slave's life of a New England farmer's wife. But then had arrived
Nathaniel, the big, handsome lad who had taken her wild, shy heart and
lost his own when they first met.

So, half rebellious, she had begun the life of a wife in the old house
from which her mother had just gone to the churchyard next door, and which
was yet filled with her brave and gentle spirit. The old woman, looking
miserably about her, remembered how at every crisis of her life the old
house had spoken to her of the line of submissive wives and mothers which
lay back of her, and had tamed her to a happy resignation in the common
fate of women. On her mother's bed she had borne the agony of childbirth
without a murmur, she whose strong young body had never known pain of any
kind. She had been a joyful prisoner to her little children, she who had
always roamed so foot-free in her girlhood, and with a patience inspired
by the thought of her place in the pilgrimage of her race, she had turned
the great strength of her love for her husband toward a contented
acceptance of the narrow life which was all he could give her.

Each smallest detail in the room had a significance running back over
years. The ragged cuts in the window-sill moved her to a sudden
recollection of how naughty little Hiram had cut them with his first
knife. With what a repressed intensity she had loved the child while she
had reproved him! How could she go away and leave every reminder of her
children! With a quick and characteristic turn she caught herself in the
flagrant contradiction involved in her reluctance to leave behind her mere
senseless reminders of her son when she was going to his actual self. And
then, with the despairing clear sight of one in a crisis of life, she knew
that, in very fact, Hiram was no longer the boy who had left them years
ago. Away from all that made up her life, under influences utterly foreign
and alien, he had spent almost twice as many years as he had with her. Not
only had the reaction from his severe training carried him to another
extreme of laxness, but as result of his continued absence he had lost all
contact with her world. He no longer consciously repudiated it, he had
crossed the deeper gulf of forgett