"I will make it now," she said. "I am ready to take him at any time."
But when she got home Mrs. Pennybacker objected strongly to the suddenness of her decision.
"Go and see the mother, Margaret, and insist upon a history of the family. Don't think of taking him without that." Caution is stronger at sixty than at twenty-six.
"I shall take him whatever the family history is!... Yes, I know it is a responsibility. And so is not taking him. He will soon be a motherless child, and my arms are empty. Aunt Mary," she went on thoughtfully, "I never used to think about these things as I do now, but I cannot see a helpless child these days without my whole heart going out to him. Is it because I am older, or is it Philip?"
"It is Philip, Margaret. This is the way God takes to enlarge our sympathies. The true mother heart can take in more than her own.... No, I know it, but all women who have borne children are not true mothers, and sometimes the very essence of maternity bubbles up in the heart of one who has never found a mate.... And there is another thing: When sorrow sits at our fireside and talks with us, it always leaves us with a quicker ear to catch what she has said to others. I doubt if you could comprehend this poor mother's anxieties if you were not yourself acquainted with grief."
She smiled to herself an hour later as Margaret drove off to the hospital, eager for the interview that would settle the matter.
"For taking her out of herself," she said, "this is almost equal to the whirl of society."
To a little white bed in the hospital ward Margaret went. Upon it a young girl, beautiful even with death's seal upon her face, half lay, half sat, propped up with pillows, her eyes from the contrast with her white face seeming preternaturally bright. There was a feverish eagerness of speech battling with a shortness of breath as she received Margaret, which told its little tale of the flaring up of life's flame, but back of that was a natural vivacity and profuseness of gesture even in her weakness that hinted at Gallic blood.
The ward was a lonely one. Over its portals a practiced eye could read, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." Its inmates went out sometimes, but they never returned. A few beds away an old woman moaned monotonously. She was near enough to have heard their conversation, but the sands of life were running so low that hearing was dulled and curiosity blotted out. It was a safe place to talk if one had anything to say.