They were so different that there was little real sympathy between them, and confidences from daughter to mother must spring, she knew, from fulness of sympathy.

"I wonder if she ever realizes how hard I have worked for her ?" she thought.

"How completely I've given up my life ?" And there rose in her thoughts the wish that her children could have stayed children forever.

"As long as they were little, they filled my life, but as soon as they get big enough for other things, they break away from me--even Archibald will change when he goes away to school, next year, and I shall never have him again as he is now." At the very time, she knew, when she needed them most--when middle-age was approaching--her children were failing her not only as companions, but as a supreme and vital reason for living.

If they could have stayed babies, she felt that she should have been satisfied to go on forever with nothing else in her life; but in a little while they would grow up and begin to lead their own intense personal lives, while she, having outlived her usefulness, would be left with only her work, with only dressmaking and millinery for a life interest.