Alice had her troubles, too, but when her thoughts came to Alice, Rachael found a certain envy in her heart.  Ah, those were the troubles she could have welcomed; she could have cried with sheer joy at the thought that her life might some day slip into the same groove as Alice’s life.  Rachael loved the atmosphere of the big, shabby house now; it was the only place to which she really cared to go.  There was in Alice Valentine’s character something simple, direct, and high-principled that communicated itself to everybody and everything in her household.  A small girl in her nursery might show symptoms of diphtheria, a broken tile on the roof might deluge the bedroom ceilings, an old cook leave suddenly, or a heavy rain fall upon a Sunday predestined for picknicking, but Alice Valentine, plain, slow of speech, and slow of thought, went her serene way, nursing, consoling, repairing, readjusting.

She had her cares about George, but they were not like Rachael’s cares for Warren.  Alice knew him to be none too strong, easily tired, often discouraged.  His professional successes were many, but there were times when the collapse of a tiny child in a free hospital could blot from George’s simple, big, tender heart the memory of a dozen achievements.  The wife, deep in the claims of her four growing children, sometimes longed to put her arms about him, to run away with him to some quiet land of sunshine and palms, some lazy curve of white beach where he could rest and sleep, and drift back to his old splendid energy and strength.  She longed to cook for him the old dishes he had loved in the early days of their marriage, to read to him, to let the world forget them while they forgot the world.

Instead, a hundred claims kept them here in the current of affairs.  Mary was a tall, sweet, gracious girl of sixteen now, like her father, a pretty edition of his red hair and long-featured clever face.  Mary must go on with her music, must be put through the lessoning and grooming of a gentlewoman, and take her place in the dancing class that would be the Junior Cotillion in a year or two.  Alice Valentine was not a worldly woman, but she knew it would be sheer cruelty to let her daughter grow up a stranger in her own world, different in speech and dress and manner from all the other girls and boys.  So Mary went to little dances at the Royces’ and the Bowditches’, and walked home from her riding lesson with little Billy Parmalee or Frank Whittaker, or with Florence Haviland and Bobby Oliphant.  And Alice watched her gowns, and her hair, and her pretty young teeth only a little less carefully than she listened to her confidences, questioned her about persons and things, and looked for inaccuracies in her speech.