Earlier in his absence, I had grown more and more into intellectual companionship with the eldest of my sisters, who was only little more than a year younger than myself. We had gone to the village parties and dances and sleigh-rides together, but she was devoted to my mother and the helper in her work, and gave herself far less than I to the pleasures which had palled upon me; she may never have cared for them much; certainly not so much as for the household life. It is one of those unavailing regrets which gather upon us if we question memory as I am doing now, and try to deal honestly with the unsparing truth of its replies, that I ignored so long her willingness to be my companion in the things of the mind. With my mother it was a simple affair; I was bound to her in an affection which was as devoted throughout my youth as it had been in my childhood; she was herself the home which I suffered such longing for if I ever left it; and I am now, in my old age, humbly grateful for the things I was prompted to do in my love of her. I could not, without an effect of exaggeration unworthy of her dear memory, express my sense of her motherly perfection within the limits of her nature, which I would not now have had different through worldly experience or privilege. She had, like my father, the instinct of poetry; and over what was left of her day's work for the long evenings which we spent reading or talking or laughing together, while my father selected copy for his paper without losing the fun we all made, she was gay with the gayest of us. Often I had savagely absented myself from the rest, but when I came out of my little study, dazed with my work, after the younger children had gone to bed, I have the vision of her rolling her sewing together in her lap, and questioning me with her fond eyes what I was thinking of or had been trying to do.