The Green Bough

by E. Temple Thurston

And in a week or two when the visitor had departed, Jane would catch Hannah's eyes across the breakfast table and direct them silently to Fanny sitting there. There was no need to say--"I told you so." Jane could convey all and more in her glance than that. She took charge of Hannah's vision, as Hannah took charge of her children. That was enough.

VI

It was to Mary Throgmorton in those days that this coming of the Abbotscombe coach is most elusive of all to define. So much less of the emotions of hopefulness, of curiosity, or even of childish interest did she betray, that there is little in action or conduct to illuminate her state of mind.

In those days, which must be understood to mean the beginning of this history, and in fact were the final decade of the last century, Mary was twenty-nine.

That is a significant age and, to any more versed in experience than she, must bring deep consideration with it. By then a woman knows the transitoriness of youth; she realizes how short is the span of time in which a woman can control her destiny. She sees in the eyes of others that life is slipping by her; she discovers how those who were children about her in her youth are gliding into the age of attractiveness, claiming attention that is not so readily hers as it was or as she imagines perhaps it might have been.

In such a state of mind must many a woman pause. It is as though for one instant she had power to arrest the traffic of time that she might take this crossing in the streets of life with unhampered deliberation. For here often she will choose her direction in the full consciousness of thought. No longer dare she leave her destiny to the hazard of chance. It has become, not the Romance that will happen upon her in the glorious and unexpected suddenness of ecstasy, but the Romance she must find, eager in her searching, swift in her choice lest life all go by and the traffic of time sweep over her.

This choice she must make or work must save her, for life has become as vital to women as it is to men. At twenty-nine this is many a woman's dilemma. Yet at twenty-nine no such consciousness of the need of deliberation had entered the mind of Mary Throgmorton. Perhaps it was because there were no younger creatures about her, growing up to the youth she was leaving behind; perhaps because in the quietness of seclusion, by that Bridnorth stream, the gentle, rippling song of it had never wakened her to life.

In the height of its flood, that Bridnorth stream had never a note to distress the placidity of her thoughts. She had heard indeed the Niagara of life in London, but as a tourist only, standing for a moment on its brink with a guide shouting the mere material facts of so-called interest in her ears. It was all too deafening and astounding to be more than a passing wonder in her mind. She would return to Bridnorth with its thunder roaring in her ears, glad of the quiet stream again and having gained no more experience of life than does an American tourist of the life of London when he counts the steps up to the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral and hurries down to catch the train to the birthplace of Shakespeare.

At twenty-nine, Mary Throgmorton was in many respects still the same girl as when at the age of eighteen she had first bound that fair hair upon her head and looked with all the seriousness of her gray eyes at the vision the reflecting mirror presented to her. Scarcely had she noticed her growth into womanhood for, as has been said, her beauty was not that of the flesh that is pink and white. It was in stone her beauty lay and even her own hands did not warm to the touch of it. But where in Bridnorth was there kindling enough to light so fierce a fire as she needed to overwhelm her?

This is the tragedy of a thousand women who pass through life and never touch its meaning; these thousand women who one day will alter the force-made laws for a world built nearer to the purpose of their being; these thousand women to whom the figure of Mary Throgmorton stands there by Bridnorth village in her monument of stone upon the Devon cliffs.