“I see now,” I said, “why you have just one rose on your table.”

“Yes”—­she returned eagerly—­“isn’t it a beauty!  I spent half an hour this morning looking for the best and most perfect rose in the garden, and there it is!”

She was now all alight with her idea, and I saw her, as we sometimes see our oldest friends, as though I had not seen her before.  She was that phenomenon of the modern world—­the free woman of forty-five.

When a woman reaches the old age of youth, the years between forty and forty-five, she either surrenders or revolts.  In the older days in America it was nearly always surrender.  Those women of a past generation bore many children:  how many graves there are in our hill cemeteries of women of forty to fifty who died leading families of five or eight or ten children!  How many second and third wives there were, often with second and third families.  Or if they did not die, how terribly they toiled, keeping the house, clothing the children, cooking the food.  Or if they bore no children, yet they were bound down by a thousand chains of convention and formality.

But in these days we have a woman of forty-five who has not surrendered.  She is a vigorous, experienced, active-minded human being, just beginning to look restlessly around her and take a new interest in the world.  Such a woman was Mary Starkweather; and this was her first revolt.

“You cannot imagine,” she was saying, “what a joy it has been to unaccumulate!  To get rid of things!  To select.”

“To become an artist in life!”

“Yes!  At last!  What a lot of perfectly worthless trash accumulates around us.  Not beautiful, not even useful!  And it is not only the lives of the well-to-do that are choked and cluttered with things.  I wish you could see the house of our Polish farmer.  He’s been saving money, and filling up his house with perfectly worthless ornaments—­ornate clocks, gorgeous plush furniture, impossible rugs—­and yet he is only doing what we are all doing on a more elaborate scale.”

I laughed.

“That reminds me of a family of squirrels that lives in an oak tree on my hill,” I said.  “I am never tired of watching them.  In the fall they work desperately, stealing all the hickory nuts and chestnuts on my neighbour Horace’s back pastures, five times as many as they need, and then they forget, half the time, where they’ve hidden them.  We’re all more or less in the squirrel stage of civilization.”

“Yes,” she responded.  “There are my books!  I gathered up books for years, just squirrel fashion, until I forgot what I had or where I put them.  You cannot know what joy I’m going to have in selecting just the essential books, the ones I want by me for daily companions.  All the others, I see now, are temporary rubbish.”

“And you’ve made your selections?”

“No, but I’m making them.  You’ll laugh when you come next time and I show them to you.  Oh, I am going to be stern with myself.  I’m not going to put a single book in that case for show, nor a single one to give the impression that I’m profoundly interested in Egypt or Maeterlinck or woman suffrage, when I’m positively not.”