Her consciousness lay like a boundless
plain on which nothing is visible. She had passed into a great calm;
and slowly there was borne across her spirit a clearness that is like
the radiance of the storm-winged sky.
And now in this calm, in this clearness, two small white figures
appeared--her children. Hitherto the energies of her mind had
grappled with the problem of her future; now memories began--memories
that decide more perhaps than anything else for us. And memories began
with her children.
She arose without making any noise, took her candle, and screening it
with the palm of her hand, started upstairs.
There were two ways by either of which she could go; a narrow rear
stairway leading from the parlor straight to their bedrooms, and the
broad stairway in the front hall. From the old maternal night-habit
she started to take the shorter way but thought of the parlor and drew
back. This room had become too truly the Judgment Seat of the
Years. She shrank from it as one who has been arraigned may shrink
from a tribunal where sentence has been pronounced which changes the
rest of life. Its flowers, its fruits, its toys, its ribbons, but
deepened the derision and the bitterness.
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