came every year to spend their holidays with their grandmother and their
aunt Margaret.

Margaret had seen but little of their mother, but her occasional
glimpses of her had left her with a haloed image of a delicate,
spiritual face that grew more and more Madonna-like with memory. The
nimbus of the Divine Mother, as she herself had dreamed of her, had
seemed indeed to illumine that grave young face.

It pleased her imagination to take the place of that phantom mother,
herself--a phantom mother. And who knows but that such dream-children,
as she called those two little girls, were more satisfactory in the end
than real children? They represented, so to say, the poetry of children.
Had Margaret been a real mother, there would have been the prose of
children as well. But here, as in so much else, Margaret's seclusion
from the responsible activities of the outside world enabled her to
gather the fine flower of existence without losing the sense of it in
the cares of its cultivation. I think that she comprehended the wonder
and joy of children more than if she had been a real mother.

Seclusion and renunciation are great sharpeners and refiners of the
sense of joy, chiefly because they encourage the habit of attentiveness.

"Our excitements are very tiny," once said the old mother to Margaret,
"therefore we make the most of them."

"I don't agree with you, mother," Margaret had answered. "I think it is
theirs that are tiny--trivial indeed, and ours that are great. People in
the world lose the values of life by having too much choice; too much
choice--of things not worth having. This makes them miss the real