Mrs. Garwood found time, of course, to "run in," as she put it, every day, though her run had to prolong itself for many blocks, and she watched Emily with a motherly solicitude. But it was Emily's heart that was lonely; she brooded constantly over her lengthened separations from Jerome. She had borne them bravely as long as they seemed but necessary postponements of the life she had wished to lead, but now it was beginning to dawn upon her that there was a spiritual separation between them, growing ever wider and wider, and the thought of this wore away day by day faith and hope, and left her sick with despair. For this her mother-in-law could give her little consolation. Not that she lacked sympathy at heart, but the tenderness of her nature could only express itself in material ways. The finer qualities of the spirit's yearnings which, in the case of a nature like Emily's, became real necessities, she could not appreciate. If at times she was haunted by a crude intuition of Emily's subjective difficulties, she had not the power to analyze them, and if she had, she would have found little patience with them. The life they had led did not of course meet the standards of her own conscience, but she was disposed to blame Emily as much as, if not more than, she did Jerome, and being a rigid old woman, who would have burned at the stake for any one of her little elementary principles, she would now, as she had done so many times before, consistently wag her head with the wise disapproval her years and experience of common life warranted her in expressing, and say: "It ain't for the best, it ain't for the best. You're too young to be apart; it ain't good for you, an' it ain't good for Jerome. Young husban's should be kept at home, should be kept at home." "But, you know, mother," Emily would argue, "I can't keep him at home, and I can't be with him there in Washington--now." And her head drooped over the white garment she was fashioning. But old Mrs. Garwood inexorably shook her head. "It won't do," she insisted, "a wife's place is by her husband, an' I s'pose women becomes mothers in Washington same's anywhere else." Emily had no strength for discussion then. It was all at one, anyway, with the monotony of her life. It became, too, but a part of her routine to follow political developments through the newspapers, trying to supply the omissions in Jerome's infrequent letters from the broad columns of the _Congressional Record_, where, for the benefit of posterity, the national politicians keep a carefully revised record of the things they wish they had said.