"I understand!" I said with a warm sense of corroboration and sympathy.

"I had so many pictures on my walls that I never saw, really saw, any of
them. I saw the dust on them, I saw the cracks in the frames, that
needed repairing, I even saw better ways of arranging them, but I very
rarely saw, with the inner eye, what the artists were trying to tell me.
And how much time I have wasted on mere food and clothing--it is
appalling! I had become nothing short of a slave to my house and my
things."

"I see now," I said, "why you have just one rose on your table."

"Yes"--she returned eagerly--"isn't it a beauty! I spent half an hour
this morning looking for the best and most perfect rose in the garden,
and there it is!"

She was now all alight with her idea, and I saw her, as we sometimes see
our oldest friends, as though I had not seen her before. She was that
phenomenon of the modern world--the free woman of forty-five.

When a woman reaches the old age of youth, the years between forty and
forty-five, she either surrenders or revolts. In the older days in
America it was nearly always surrender. Those women of a past
generation bore many children: how many graves there are in our hill
cemeteries of women of forty to fifty who died leading families of five
or eight or ten children! How many second and third wives there were,
often with second and third families. Or if they did not die, how
terribly they toiled, keeping the house, clothing the children, cooking
the food. Or if they bore no children, yet they were bound down by a
thousand chains of convention and formality.