PREFACE
It has been said that 'Novelists are the Showmen of life.' Perhaps because the world has passed through a time of special stress and strain it has come about that the modern novel is largely concerned with the complexities of life and is very often an unhappy and a tiring thing to read.
Yet humour, happiness, and love exist and are just as real as gloom, so need the 'realism' of a book be called in question because it pictures pleasant scenes?
For there are still some joyous souls who smile their way through life because they take its experience with a simplicity that is rarer than it used to be.
This, then, is the story of a woman whose outlook was a happy one; whose mind was never rent by any great temptations, and who, because she was NOT 'misunderstood in early youth,' never struggled for 'self-expression,' but only to express herself (in as many words as possible!) to the great amusement and uplifting of her family!
For these reasons this book, like that of the immortal Mr Jorrocks, 'does not aspire to the dignity of a novel,' but is just a story—an April mixture of sun and shadow—as most lives are; a book to read when you're tired, perhaps, since it tells of love and a home and garden and such like restful things. And if it makes you smile and sigh at times, well, maybe, that is because life brings to many of us, especially to the women folk, very much the same 'experience.'
C. C.
PART I
'When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child....'
CHAPTER I