“Oh, it’s too much trouble dressing, mother.  What do you think?”

“Well, I suppose it is,” answers the mother.  “Besides, I want to hear what happens next to those two beautiful young people in our book.  So be quick with my old diet, and come and read ...”

There is perhaps nothing so lovely or so well worth having as the gratitude of the old towards the young that care to give them more than the perfunctory ministrations to which they have long since grown sadly accustomed.  There was no reward in the world that Margaret would have exchanged for the sweet looks of her old mother, who, being no merely selfish invalid, knew the value and the cost of the devotion her daughter was giving her.

“I can give you so little, my child, for all you are giving me,” her mother would sometimes say; and the tears would spring to Margaret’s eyes.

Yes!  Margaret had her reward in this alone—­that she had cared to decipher the lined old document of her mother’s face.  Her other sisters had passed it by more or less impatiently.  It was like some ancient manuscript in a museum, which only a loving and patient scholar takes the trouble to read.  But the moment you begin to pick out the words, how its crabbed text blossoms with beautiful meanings and fascinating messages!  It is as though you threw a dried rose into some magic water, and saw it unfold and take on bloom, and fill with perfume, and bring back the nightingale that sang to it so many years ago.  So Margaret loved her mother’s old face, and learned to know the meaning of every line on it.  Privileged to see that old face in all its private moments of feeling, under the transient revivification of deathless memories, she was able, so to say, to reconstruct its perished beauty, and realize the romance of which it was once the alluring candle.  For her mother had been a very great beauty, and if, like Margaret, you are able to see it, there is no history so fascinating as the bygone love-affairs of old people.  How much more fascinating to read one’s mother’s love-letters than one’s own!

Even in the history of the heart recent events have a certain crudity, and love itself seems the more romantic for having lain in lavender for fifty years.  A certain style, a certain distinction, beyond question, go with antiquity, and to spend your days with a refined old mother is no less an education in style and distinction than to spend them in the air of old cities, under the shadow of august architecture and in the sunset of classic paintings.

The longer Margaret lived with her old mother, the less she valued the so-called “opportunities” she had missed.  Coming out of her mother’s world of memories, there seemed something small, even common, about the younger generation to which she belonged,—­something lacking in significance and dignity.