For example, it had been her dream, as it is the dream of every true woman, to be a mother herself:  and yet, somehow—­though she would not admit it in so many words—­when her young married sisters came with their babies, there was something about their bustling and complacent domesticity that seemed to make maternity bourgeois.  She had not dreamed of being a mother like that.  She was convinced that her old mother had never been a mother like that.  “They seem more like wet-nurses than mothers,” she said to herself, with her wicked wit.

Was there, she asked herself, something in realization that inevitably lost you the dream?  Was to incarnate an ideal to materialize it?  Did the finer spirit of love necessarily evaporate like some volatile essence with marriage?  Was it better to remain on idealistic spectator such as she—­than to run the risks of realization?

She was far too beautiful, and had declined too many offers of commonplace marriage, for such questioning to seem the philosophy of disappointment.  Indeed, the more she realized her own situation, the more she came to regard what others considered her sacrifice to her mother as a safeguard against the risk of a mediocre domesticity.  Indeed, she began to feel a certain pride, as of a priestess, in the conservation of the dignity of her nature.  It is better to be a vestal virgin than—­some mothers.

And, after all, the maternal instinct of her nature found an ideal outlet in her brother’s children—­the two little motherless girls who came every year to spend their holidays with their grandmother and their aunt Margaret.

Margaret had seen but little of their mother, but her occasional glimpses of her had left her with a haloed image of a delicate, spiritual face that grew more and more Madonna-like with memory.  The nimbus of the Divine Mother, as she herself had dreamed of her, had seemed indeed to illumine that grave young face.

It pleased her imagination to take the place of that phantom mother, herself—­a phantom mother.  And who knows but that such dream-children, as she called those two little girls, were more satisfactory in the end than real children?  They represented, so to say, the poetry of children.  Had Margaret been a real mother, there would have been the prose of children as well.  But here, as in so much else, Margaret’s seclusion from the responsible activities of the outside world enabled her to gather the fine flower of existence without losing the sense of it in the cares of its cultivation.  I think that she comprehended the wonder and joy of children more than if she had been a real mother.

Seclusion and renunciation are great sharpeners and refiners of the sense of joy, chiefly because they encourage the habit of attentiveness.

“Our excitements are very tiny,” once said the old mother to Margaret, “therefore we make the most of them.”