So Barbara fell a-dreaming, and the light of the dying embers lay lovingly upon her face, already transfigured by tenderness into beauty beyond words. The lamp went out and little by little the room faded into twilight, then [14]into night. It was quite dark when she leaned over and picked up her crutches. [14] "Dear, dear father," she breathed. "He must never know!" [15] [15] II Miss Mattie Miss Mattie was getting supper, sustained by the comforting thought that her task was utterly beneath her and had been forced upon her by the mysterious workings of an untoward Fate. She was not really "Miss," since she had been married and widowed, and a grown son was waiting impatiently in the sitting-room for his evening meal, but her neighbours, nearly all of whom had known her before her marriage, still called her "Miss Mattie." The arbitrary social distinctions, made regardless of personality, are often cruelly ironical. Many a man, incapable by nature of life-long devotion to one woman, becomes a husband in half an hour, duly sanctioned by Church and State. A woman who remains unmarried, because, with fine courage, she will have her true mate or none, is called "an old maid." She may have the heart of a wife and the soul of a mother, but she cannot escape her sinister label. The real "old maids" are of [16]both sexes, and many are married, but alas! seldom to each other. [16] In his introspective moments, Roger Austin sometimes wondered why marriage, maternity, and bereavement should have left no trace upon his mother. The uttermost depths of life had been hers for the sounding, but Miss Mattie had refused to drop her plummet overboard and had spent the years in prolonged study of her own particular boat. She came in, with the irritating air of a martyr, and clucked sharply with her false teeth when she saw that her son was reading. "I don't know what I've done," she remarked, "that I should have to live all the time with people who keep their noses in books. Your pa was forever readin' and you're marked with it. I could set here and set here and set here, and he took no more notice of me than if I was a piece of
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