thus make up for the commoner experience lost by a rarer experience
gained. By dedicating herself to her sick mother, Margaret undoubtedly
lost much of the average experience of her sex and age, but almost
imperceptibly it had been borne in upon her that she made some important
gains of a finer kind. She had been brought very close to the mystery of
human life, closer than those who have nothing to do beyond being
thoughtlessly happy can ever come. The nurse and the priest are
initiates of the same knowledge. Each alike is a sentinel on the
mysterious frontier between this world and the next. The nearer we
approach that frontier, the more we understand not only of that world on
the other side, but of the world on this. It is only when death throws
its shadow over the page of life that we realize the full significance
of what we are reading. Thus, by her mother's bedside, Margaret was
learning to read the page of life under the illuminating shadow of
death.

But, apart from any such mystical compensation, Margaret's great reward
was that she knew her beautiful old mother better than any one else in
the world knew her. As a rule, and particularly in a large family,
parents remain half mythical to their children, awe-inspiring presences
in the home, colossal figures of antiquity, about whose knees the
younger generation crawls and gropes, but whose heads are hidden in the
mists of prehistoric legend. They are like personages in the Bible. They
impress our imagination, but we cannot think of them as being quite
real. Their histories smack of legend. And this, of course, is natural,
for they had been in the world, had loved and suffered, so long before
us that they seem a part of that antenatal mystery out of which we
sprang. When they speak of their old love-stories, it is as though we
were reading Homer. It sounds so long ago. We are surprised at the
vividness with which they recall happenings and personalities, past and