She crossed the room instinctively, and sat on the arm of her mother's chair.

Mrs.Hilbery leant her head against her daughter's body.
"What is nobler," she mused, turning over the photographs, "than to be a woman to whom every one turns, in sorrow or difficulty?
How have the young women of your generation improved upon that, Katharine?
I can see them now, sweeping over the lawns at Melbury House, in their flounces and furbelows, so calm and stately and imperial (and the monkey and the little black dwarf following behind), as if nothing mattered in the world but to be beautiful and kind.

But they did more than we do, I sometimes think.

They WERE, and that's better than doing.

They seem to me like ships, like majestic ships, holding on their way, not shoving or pushing, not fretted by little things, as we are, but taking their way, like ships with white sails." Katharine tried to interrupt this discourse, but the opportunity did not come, and she could not forbear to turn over the pages of the album in which the old photographs were stored.