Mrs. John Kensett was one of those icy women with thin lips and cold grey eyes, made up from the first without a heart—­women who make a cool atmosphere about them even in the heat of summer.  She was tall and stylish and handsomely dressed, and when she mounted her gold eyeglasses and through them severely looked one over, she was formidable indeed to so meek a woman as her mother-in-law.  She must have married John Kensett because an establishment is more complete with a man at the head of it, for that was the chief end of her life to keep all things in perfect running order in that elegantly appointed home, and to keep abreast of the times in all new adornings and furnishings under the sun.  One Scripture admonition at least she gave heed to:  she looked well to the ways of her household.  One might explore from garret to cellar in that house and find nothing out of place, nothing soiled, nothing left undone that should have been done.  She was withal, a rigid economist in small things.  Everything was kept under lock and key, and doled out in very small quantities to the servants.  Her table could never merit the charge of being vulgarly loaded; the furnace heat was never allowed to run above a certain mark on the thermometer, no matter who shivered, and she had doubtless walked miles in turning gas jets to just the right point.

In this most elegant, precise, immaculate house, where everything and everybody was controlled by certain unvarying and inflexible rules, the old mother felt almost as straitened as she ever had in the small topsy-turvy one.

Her room was scarcely above shivering point, and the back windows overlooked no cheerful prospect.  Here day after day she sat alone; she had food and shelter and clothes, what more could old people possibly want?  At meal times her son was silent and abstracted or absorbed in his newspaper.  If anybody had told him that his old mother’s heart was nearly breaking for lack of loving sympathy, he would have been astonished.  The faded eyes often grew dim with tears as she looked at him—­the frigid, unbending man—­and remembered him as he was in those first years of her married life, darling little Johnnie in white dresses and long curls, running after butterflies and picking flowers; if he only would kiss her once more, or do something to make her sure that he was Johnnie, she was hungry for a tender word from him.  Ah! if mothers could see down the years that stretch ahead, it would not always be so hard to lay the little lisping ones under the ground.  Was it decreed that most mothers shall be in sympathy with that other one, of whom it is written, “A sword shall pierce thine, own heart also”?

We shall never know about the wounds from those dear, self-sacrificing mothers, but they are there, even though they may strive to hide them and find excuses for the cold neglect, indifference to their comfort, impatience, and the putting them one side as if to say:  “What is all this to you?  It is time you were dead.”