It was needful that they should think that the picking of peas in a sun-bonnet, or long readings by her own fire-side, and solitary hours spent in thinking, were specially to her mind.

"Mamma doesn't like going out." "I don't think mamma is happy anywhere out of her own drawing-room." I do not say that the girls were taught to say such words, but they were taught to have thoughts which led to such words, and in the early days of their going out into the world used so to speak of their mother.

But a time came to them before long,--to one first and then to the other, in which they knew that it was not so, and knew also all that their mother had suffered for their sakes.
And in truth Mrs Dale could have been as young in heart as they were.

She, too, could have played croquet, and have coquetted with a haymaker's rake, and have delighted in her pony, ay, and have listened to little nothings from this and that Apollo, had she thought that things had been conformable thereto.

Women at forty do not become ancient misanthropes, or stern Rhadamanthine moralists, indifferent to the world's pleasures--no, not even though they be widows.