Surely that is not a mere dispute about words." "But, if we are not those girls, then what has become of them ?" asked Mrs.Slater.
"You might better ask what had become of them if you had to seek them in us; but I will tell you what has become of them, Sarah.

It is what will become of us when we, in our turn, vanish from earth, and the places that know us now shall know us no more.

They are immortal with God, and we shall one day meet them over there." "What a very odd idea!" exclaimed Mrs.Slater, regarding her friend with astonishment.
Miss Ludington flushed slightly as she replied, "I don't think it half so odd, and not nearly so repulsive, as your notion, that we old women are the mummies of the girls who came before us.

It is easier, as well as far sweeter, for me to believe that our youth is somewhere immortal, than that it has been withered, shrivelled, desiccated into our old age.

Oh, no, my dear, Paradise is not merely a garden of withered flowers! We shall find the rose and lily of our life blooming there." The hours had slipped away unnoticed as the friends talked together, and now the lengthening shadows on the school-room floor recalled Miss Ludington to the present, and to the duties of a hostess.
As they walked slowly across the green toward the homestead, she told her friend more fully of this belief in the immortality of past selves which had so recently come to her, and especially how it had quite taken away the melancholy with which she had all her life before looked back upon her youth.