two others
which they cultivated at least as zealously. One of these was simply the
society of old Miss Birdseye, of whom Olive saw more this winter than
she had ever seen before. It had become apparent that her long and
beautiful career was drawing to a close, her earnest, unremitting work
was over, her old-fashioned weapons were broken and dull. Olive would
have liked to hang them up as venerable relics of a patient fight, and
this was what she seemed to do when she made the poor lady relate her
battles--never glorious and brilliant, but obscure and wastefully
heroic--call back the figures of her companions in arms, exhibit her
medals and scars. Miss Birdseye knew that her uses were ended; she might
pretend still to go about the business of unpopular causes, might fumble
for papers in her immemorial satchel and think she had important
appointments, might sign petitions, attend conventions, say to Doctor
Prance that if she would only make her sleep she should live to see a
great many improvements yet; she ached and was weary, growing almost as
glad to look back (a great anomaly for Miss Birdseye) as to look
forward. She let herself be coddled now by her friends of the new
generation; there were days when she seemed to want nothing better than
to sit by Olive's fire and ramble on about the old struggles, with a
vague, comfortable sense--no physical rapture of Miss Birdseye's could
be very acute--of immunity from wet feet, from the draughts that prevail
at thin meetings, of independence of street-cars that would probably
arrive overflowing; and also a pleased perception, not that she was an
example to these fresh lives which began with more advantages than hers,
but that she was in some degree an encouragement, as she helped them to
measure the way the new truths had advanced--being able to tell them of
such a different state of things when she was a young lady, the daughter
of a very talented teacher (indeed her mother had been a teacher too),
down in Connecticut. She had always had for Olive a kind of aroma of
martyrdom, and her battered, unremunerated, un-pensioned old age brought
angry tears, springing from depths of outraged theory, into Miss
Chancellor's eyes. For Verena, too, she was a picturesque humanitary
figure. Verena had been in the habit of meeting martyrs from her
childhood up, but she had seen none with so many reminiscences as Miss
Birdseye, or who had been so nearly scorched by penal fires. She had had