I am sure that I shall surprise no mother of a large family when I say that this hour is the first one I have spent alone for thirty years.  I count it, alone.  For while I am driving back in the runabout along the six miles of leafy road between the hospital and Eastridge with mother beside me, she is sound asleep under the protection of her little hinged black sunshade, still held upright.  She will sleep until we are at home; and, after our anxious morning at the hospital, I am most grateful to the fortune sending me this lucid interval, not only for thinking over what has occurred in the last three days, but also for trying to focus clearly for myself what has happened in the last week, since Elizabeth went on the 5.40 to New York; since Charles followed Elizabeth; since Maria, under Dr. Denbigh’s mysteriously required escort, followed Charles; since Tom followed Maria; and since Cyrus, with my dear girl, followed Tom.

On the warm afternoon before Elizabeth left, as I walked past her open door, with Lena, and carrying an egg-nog to Peggy, I could not avoid hearing down the whole length of the hall a conversation carried on in clear, absorbed tones, between my sister and Alice.

“Did I understand you to say,” said Elizabeth, in an assumption of indifference too elaborate, I think, to deceive even her niece, “that this Mr. Wilde you mention is now living in New York?”

“Oh yes.  He conducts all the art-classes at the Crafts Settlement.  He encouraged Lorraine’s sisters in their wonderful work.  I would love to go into it myself.”

Lorraine’s sisters and her circle once entertained me at tea in their establishment when I visited Charles before his marriage, in New York.  They are extremely kind young women, ladies in every respect, who have a workshop called “At the Sign of the Three-legged Stool.”  They seem to be carpenters, as nearly as I can tell.  They wear fillets and bright, loose clothes; and they make very rough-hewn burnt-wood footstools and odd settees with pieces of glass set about in them.  It is all very puzzling.  When Charles showed me a candlestick one of the young ladies had made, and talked to me about the decoration and the line, I could see that it was very gracefully designed and nicely put together.  But when he noticed that in the wish to be perfectly open-minded to his point of view I was looking very attentively at a queer, uneven wrought-iron brooch with two little pendant polished granite rocks, he only laughed and put his hand on my shawl a minute and brought me more tea.

So that I could understand something of what Alice was mentioning as she went on:  “You know Lorraine says that, though not the most prominent, Lyman Wilde is the most Radical and temperamental leader in the great handicraft development in this country.  Even most of the persons in favor of it consider that he goes too far.  She says, for instance, he is so opposed to machines of all sorts that he thinks it would be better to abolish printing and return to script.  He has started what they call a little movement of the kind now, and is training two young scriveners.”