od-humored.

"Linnet has no decided tastes about anything but housekeeping and
fancy-work, and Marjorie has some other things to be growing in," said
her father.

"I wish she would grow to some purpose then," was the energetic reply.

"As the farmer said about his seed before it was time for it to sprout,"
laughed the children's father.

This father and mother could not talk confidentially together five
minutes without bringing the "children" in.

Their own future was every day; but the children had not begun to live in
theirs yet; their golden future, which was to be all the more golden
because of their parents' experiences.

This mother was so very old-fashioned that she believed that there was no
career open to a girl beside marriage; the dreadful alternative was
solitary old-maidenhood. She was a good mother, in many respects a wise
mother; but she would not have slept that night had she believed that
either of her daughters would attain to thirty years unmarried. This may
have been owing to a defect of education, or it may have been that she
was so happily married to a husband six years her junior--whom she could
manage. And she was nearly thirty when she was married herself and had
really begun to believe that she should never be married at all. She
believed marriage to be so honorable in all, that the absence of it, as
in Miss Prudence's case, was nearly dishonorable. She was almost a Jewish
mother in her reverence for marriage and joyfulness for the blessing of
children. This may have been the result of her absorbed study of the Old
Testament Scriptures. Marjorie had wondered why her mother in addressing
the Lord had cried, "O, Lord God of Israel," and instead of any other
name nearer New Testament Christians, she would speak of him as "The Holy
One of Israel." Sometimes I have thought that Marjorie's mother began her
religious life as a Jew, and that instead of being a Gentile Christian
she was in reality a converted Jew, something like what Elizabeth would
have been if she had been more like Marjorie's mother and Graham West's
wife. This type of womanhood is rare in this nineteenth century; for
aught I know, she is not a representative woman, at all; she is the only
one I ever knew, and perhaps you never saw any one like her. She has no
heresies, she can prove every assertion from the Bible, her principles
are as firm as adamant and her heart as tender as a mother's. Still,
marriage and motherhood have b