“They are treasures I am laying up for my old age. They will be my life and joy and hope, when I shall have grown too old to achieve these things. Their laughter will lift me. Their love will be my perpetual spring. And we shall have weddings in this house,” she concluded. “You believe in marriage?” the other could not refrain from asking. “Oh, yes. Even in my own.” “You would go back to your husband?” “Never.” There was a silence. “But if he comes back to you?” “He will not come,” she returned. When I came to know her later, she must have been confirmed in this opinion. For I had lived a year in Shannon before I learned that George Cutter was not a dead and buried man. He had passed with that flotsam and jetsam tide created by the Great War. And the House of Helen had become the center of social life in Shannon. She was a sedate hostess, always garnished with her children. She had declared this kind of natural peace, and kept it in a world rocking with the confusion which followed the war. She belonged to the deep furrow of life, where the soil is rich and strong. If she had been an herb of the fields, she would have been an evergreen herb. If she had been a tree, her boughs would never have shed their leaves. If she had been a rose, she would have bloomed fairest above a hoarfrost. The lives of many of us, who were drawn to her during this time by one sort of distress or another, took root in her quiet heart, and it was her wish that not one of these should suffer or perish. The ignobly wise believe that this opulence of kindness is no more than the manifestation of the nature of women, not a virtue, but the maternal instinct common to all mammals. If you ask me, I should point to the prevailing type of modern woman as an example of what mere Nature does for a woman. She is a brilliant creature, ready to show the iridescent wings of her charms to all men, not one man; a childless wife, ready to sue for her liberty and alimony on the slightest provocation; an ambitious person, futilely active, who farms out her home to servants that she may become the dupe and handmaiden of politicians. She belongs to the fashionable scrubwoman class, who take the job of cleaning up the town and setting the table for the next convention. She is subsidized by compliments and favors. There is nothing permanent in her; and she will not increase nor multiply after the manner of her kind. She is the lightest, most transient phase of her sex we have yet seen. But she is astonishingly natural. Few tales end with the death of the principal characters. They usually end just as the heroes and heroines begin to live happy ever after. And you are obliged to take the author’s word for that, because the statement is contrary to all human experience. Still you must expect the approaching end of this chronicle, because the House of Helen has been established. There remains one last scene. CHAPTER XXI