world of memories, there seemed something small, even common, about the
younger generation to which she belonged,--something lacking in
significance and dignity.

For example, it had been her dream, as it is the dream of every true
woman, to be a mother herself: and yet, somehow--though she would not
admit it in so many words--when her young married sisters came with
their babies, there was something about their bustling and complacent
domesticity that seemed to make maternity bourgeois. She had not dreamed
of being a mother like that. She was convinced that her old mother had
never been a mother like that. "They seem more like wet-nurses than
mothers," she said to herself, with her wicked wit.

Was there, she asked herself, something in realization that inevitably
lost you the dream? Was to incarnate an ideal to materialize it? Did the
finer spirit of love necessarily evaporate like some volatile essence
with marriage? Was it better to remain on idealistic spectator such as
she--than to run the risks of realization?

She was far too beautiful, and had declined too many offers of
commonplace marriage, for such questioning to seem the philosophy of
disappointment. Indeed, the more she realized her own situation, the
more she came to regard what others considered her sacrifice to her
mother as a safeguard against the risk of a mediocre domesticity.
Indeed, she began to feel a certain pride, as of a priestess, in the
conservation of the dignity of her nature. It is better to be a vestal
virgin than--some mothers.

And, after all, the maternal instinct of her nature found an ideal
outlet in her brother's children--the two little motherless girls who