No, she demurred, not a baby’s face, but—­then she laughed aloud at herself—­was not her fate the common fate of all?  Who, among her friends, at forty years of age, was ever taken, or mistaken, for twenty-five or thirty?  And if she were, what then?  Would her work be worth more to the world?  Would the angels encamp about her more faithfully or more lovingly?  And, then, was there not a face “marred”?  Did he live his life upon the earth with no sign of it in his face?  Was it not a part of his human nature to grow older?  Could she be human and not grow old?  If she lived she must grow old; to grow old or to die, that was the question, and then she laughed again, this time more merrily.  Had she made the changes herself by fretting and worrying; had she taken life too hard?  Yes; she had taken life hard.  Another glance into the glass revealed another fact:  her neck was not as full and round and white as it once was:  there was a suggestion of old china about that, too.  She would discard linen collars and wear softening white ruffles; it would not be deceitful to hide Time’s naughty little tracery.  She smiled this time; she was coming to a hard place in her life.  She had believed—­oh, how much in vain!—­that she had come to all the hard places and waded through them, but here there was looming up another, fully as hard, perhaps harder, because it was not so tangible and, therefore, harder to face and fight.  The acknowledging that she had come to this hard place was something.  She remembered the remark of an old lady, who was friendless and poor:  “The hardest time of my life was between forty and forty-five; I had to accept several bitter facts that after became easier to bear.”  Prudence Pomeroy looked at herself, then looked up to God and accepted, submissively, even cheerfully, his fact that she had begun to grow old, and then, she dressed herself for a walk and with her sun-umbrella and a volume of poems started out for her tramp along the road and through the fields to find her little friend Marjorie.  The china plate and pathetic note last night had moved her strangely.  Marjorie was in the beginning of things.  What was her life worth if not to help such as Marjorie live a worthier life than her own two score years had been?

A face flushed with the long walk looked in at the window upon Marjorie asleep.  The child was sitting near the open window in a wooden rocker with padded arms and back and covered with calico with a green ground sprinkled over with butterflies and yellow daisies; her head was thrown back against the knitted tidy of white cotton, and her hands were resting in her lap; the blue muslin was rather more crumpled than when she had seen it last, and instead of the linen collar the lace was knotted about her throat.  The bandage had been removed from her forehead, the swelling had abated but the discolored spot was plainly visible; her lips were slightly parted, her cheeks were rosy; if this were the “beginning of things” it was a very sweet and peaceful beginning.