For the first time she was vaguely perceiving that life is
everlasting movement. Youth really believes what is running
water to be a permanent crystallization and sees time fixed to a
point: some people have dark hair, some people have blond hair,
some people have gray hair. Until this moment, Alice had no
conviction that there was a universe before she came into it.
She had always thought of it as the background of herself: the
moon was something to make her prettier on a summer night.

But this old letter, through which she saw still flickering an
ancient starlight of young love, astounded her. Faintly before
her it revealed the whole lives of her father and mother, who had
been young, after all--they REALLY had--and their youth was now
so utterly passed from them that the picture of it, in the
letter, was like a burlesque of them. And so she, herself, must
pass to such changes, too, and all that now seemed vital to her
would be nothing.

When her work was finished, that afternoon, she went into her
father's room. His recovery had progressed well enough to permit
the departure of Miss Perry; and Adams, wearing one of Mrs.
Adams's wrappers over his night-gown, sat in a high-backed chair
by a closed window. The weather was warm, but the closed window
and the flannel wrapper had not sufficed him: round his shoulders
he had an old crocheted scarf of Alice's; his legs were wrapped
in a heavy comfort; and, with these swathings about him, and his
eyes closed, his thin and grizzled head making but a slight
indentation in the pillow supporting it, he looked old and little
and queer.