long spells together. And so it was during these months nursing her
mother. She attended constantly on the invalid: she did a good deal
of work about the house: she took her walks and occupied her place
in the choir on Sunday mornings. And yet, from August to January,
she seemed to be seated in her chair in the bedroom, sometimes
reading, but mostly quite still, her hands quietly in her lap, her
mind subdued by musing. She did not even think, not even remember.
Even such activity would have made her presence too disturbing in
the room. She sat quite still, with all her activities in
abeyance--except that strange will-to-passivity which was by no
means a relaxation, but a severe, deep, soul-discipline.
For the moment there was a sense of prosperity--or probable
prosperity, in the house. And there was an abundance of
Throttle-Ha'penny coal. It was dirty ashy stuff. The lower bars of
the grate were constantly blanked in with white powdery ash, which
it was fatal to try to poke away. For if you poked and poked, you
raised white cumulus clouds of ash, and you were left at last with a
few darkening and sulphurous embers. But even so, by continuous
application, you could keep the room moderately warm, without
feeling you were consuming the house's meat and drink in the grate.
Which was one blessing.
The days, the months darkened past, and Alvina returned to her old
thinness and pallor. Her fore-arms were thin, they rested very still
in her lap, there was a ladylike stillness about them as she took
her walk, in her lingering, yet watchful fashion. She saw
everything. Yet she passed without attracting any attention.
Early in the year her mother died. Her father came and wept
self-conscious tears, Miss Frost cried a little, painfully. And
Alvina cried also: she did not quite know why or wherefore. Her poor
mother! Alvina had the old-fashioned wisdom to let be, and not to
think. After all, it was not for her to reconstruct her parents'
lives. She came after them. Her day was not their day, their life
was not hers. Returning up-channel to re-discover their course was
quite another matter from flowing down-stream into the unknown, as
they had done thirty years before. This supercilious and impertinent
exploration of the generation gone by, by the present generation, is
nothing to our credit. As a matter of fact, no generation repeats
the mistakes of the generation ahead, any more than any river
repeats its course. So the young need not be so proud of their
superiority over the old. The young generation glibly makes its own
mistakes: and _how_ detestable these new mistakes are, why, only the
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