ier, Horace. The steady, dependable kind.
I'd be a pretty poor sort of mother, wouldn't I, if----" etc.

Horace's first job took him out to South America. He was jubilant,
excited, remorseful, eager, downcast, all at once. He and Louise were
married a month before the time set for leaving and she went with him.
It was a job for a young and hardy and adventurous. On the day they
left, Hannah felt, for the first time in her life, bereaved, widowed,
cheated.

There followed, then, ten years of hard work and rigid economy. She
lived in good boarding houses, and hated them. She hated them so much
that, toward the end, she failed even to find amusement in the
inevitable wall pictures of plump, partially draped ladies lounging on
couches and being tickled in their sleep by overfed cupids in mid-air.
She saved and scrimped with an eye to the time when she would no longer
work. She made some shrewd and well-advised investments. At the end of
these ten years she found herself possessed of a considerable sum whose
investment brought her a sufficient income, with careful management.

Life had tricked Hannah Winter, but it had not beaten her. And there,
commonplace or dramatic, depending on one's viewpoint, you have the
first sixty years of Hannah Winter's existence.

This is the curious thing about them. Though heavy, these years had
flown. The working, the planning, the hoping, had sped them by, somehow.
True, things that never used to tire her tired her now, and she
acknowledged it. She was older, of course. But she never thought of
herself as old. Perhaps she did not allow herself to think thus. She had
married, brought children into the world, made their future sure--or as
sure as is humanly possible. And yet she never said, "My work is done.
My life is over." About the future she was still as eager as a girl. She
was a grandmother. Marcia and Ed had two children, Joan, nine, and
Peter, seven (strong simple names were the mode just then).

Perhaps you know that hotel on the lake front built during the World's
Fair days? A roomy, rambling, smoke-blackened, comfortable old
structure, ringed with verandas, its shabby facade shabbier by contrast
with the beds of tulips or geraniums or canna that jewel its lawn. There
Hannah Winter went to live. It was within five minutes' walk of Marcia's
apartment. Rather expensive, but as homelike as a hotel could be and
housing many old-time Chicago friends.

She had one room, rather small