She had been trying to span the unfathomable with a mean and grasping desire.  Now she knew what she must try to do; to give up the lesser and receive the greater.

* * * * *

This passed and left her, looking straight before her at the flickering shadows, leaping among the dusky corners of the dark slant-ceilinged room.  The old clock struck three in the hall behind her.

She felt tired now, as she had after the other travail which had given her her children, and leaned her head on her hand.  Where did she herself, her own personal self come in, with all this?  It was always a call to more effort which came.  To get the great good things of life how much you had to give!  How much of what seemed dearly yourself, you had to leave behind as you went forward!  Her childhood was startlingly called up by this old garret, where nothing had changed:  she could still see herself, running about there, happily absorbed in the vital trivialities of her ten years.  She had not forgotten them, she knew exactly the thrill felt by that shadowy little girl as she leaned over the old chest yonder, and pulled out the deep-fringed shawl and quilted petticoat.

It had been sweet to be a little girl, she thought wistfully, to have had no past, to know only the shining present of every day with no ominous, difficult future beyond it.  Ineffably sweet too was the aroma of perfect trust in the strength and wisdom of grown-up people, which tinctured deep with certainty every profoundest layer of her consciousness.  Ineffably sweet . . . and lost forever.  There was no human being in the world as wise and strong as poor old Cousin Hetty had seemed to her then.  A kingdom of security from which she was now shut out.

And the games, the fantastic plays,—­how whole and rounded and entire, the pleasure in them!  She remembered the rainy day she had played paper-dolls here once, with little Margaret Congdon . . . dead, years ago, that much-loved playmate of past summer days . . . and how they had taken the chest for the house for Margaret’s dolls, and the hair-trunk where she sat, for hers; how they had arranged them with the smallest of playthings, with paste-board furniture, and bits of colored tissue paper for rugs, and pieces of silk and linen from the rag-bag for bed-clothes; how they had hummed and whistled to themselves as they worked (she could hear them now!); and how the aromatic woodsy smell of the unfinished old room and the drone of the rain on the roof had been a part of their deep content.

Nothing had changed in that room, except the woman who sat there.

She got up with a sudden impulse, and threw back the lid of the trunk.  A faint musty odor rose from it, as though it had been shut up for very long.  And . . . why, there it was, the doll’s room, just as they had left it, how long ago!  How like this house!  How like Cousin Hetty never to have touched it!