Sometimes, now that she had settled down into this new way of life, she was secretly aware of feeling a little lonely; there were hours when the sense of being only a visitor in the house where her life ought to have been lived gave her the same drifting uprooted feeling which had been the curse of her other existence. It was not Anne’s fault; nor that, in this new life, every moment was not interesting and even purposeful, since each might give her the chance of serving Anne, pleasing Anne, in some way or another getting closer to Anne. But this very feeling took a morbid intensity from the fact of having no common memories, no shared associations, to feed on. Kate was frightened, sometimes, by its likeness to that other isolated and devouring emotion which her love for Chris had been. Everything might have been different, she thought, if she had had more to do, or more friends of her own to occupy her. But Anne’s establishment, which had been her grandmother’s, still travelled smoothly enough on its own momentum, and though the girl insisted that her mother was now the head of the house, the headship involved little more than ordering dinner, and talking over linen and carpets and curtains with old Mrs. Clephane’s house-keeper. Then, as to friends--was it because she was too much engrossed in her daughter to make any? Or because her life had been too incommunicably different from that of her bustling middle-aged contemporaries, absorbed by local and domestic questions she had no part in? Or had she been too suddenly changed from a self-centred woman, insatiable for personal excitements, into that new being, a mother, her centre of gravity in a life not hers? She did not know; she felt only that she no longer had time for anything but motherhood, and must be content to bridge over, as best she could, the unoccupied intervals. And, after all, the intervals were not many. Her daughter never appeared without instantly filling up every crevice of the present, and overflowing into the past and the future, so that, even in the mother’s rare lapses into despondency, life without Anne, like life before Anne, had become unthinkable. She was revolving this for the thousandth time as she turned into the Park one afternoon to meet Anne on the latter’s way homeward. The days were already much longer; the difference in the light, and that premature languor of the air which comes, in America, before the sleeping earth seems to expect it, made Mrs. Clephane feel that the year had turned, that a new season was opening in her new life. She walked on with the vague sense of confidence in the future which the first touch of spring gives. The worst of the way was past--how easily, how smoothly to the feet! Where misunderstanding and failure had been so probable, she was increasingly sure of having understood and succeeded. And already she and Anne were making delightful plans for the spring....