After this she had said nothing more, but gathering suddenly all her energies, she had precipitated a scene with the servants (which ended to her relief in the departure of the magnificent butler) and had reorganized at a stroke the affairs of her household. For all her gentleness, she was not incapable of decisive action, and though it had always been easier for her to work herself than to direct others, her native talent for domesticity had enabled her to emerge triumphantly out of this crisis. Now, on her forty-fifth birthday, she could reflect with pride (the pride of a woman who has mastered her traditional _métier de femme_) that there was not a house in Dinwiddie which had better food or smoother service than she provided in hers. For more and more, as Oliver absorbed himself in his work, which kept him in New York many months of the year, and the children grew so big that they no longer needed her, did her life centre around the small monotonous details of cooking and cleaning. Only when, as occasionally happened, the rest of the family were absent together, Oliver about his plays, Lucy on a visit to Richmond, and Harry and Jenny at college, an awful sense of futility descended upon her, and she felt that both the purpose and the initiative were sapped from her character. Sometimes, during such days or weeks of loneliness, she would think of her mother's words, uttered so often in the old years at the rectory: "There isn't any pleasure in making things unless there's somebody to make them for."