“I should like to know what time!” was the sharp reply.

It was queer about Marjorie’s mother, she was as sharp as she was good-humored.

“Linnet has no decided tastes about anything but housekeeping and fancy-work, and Marjorie has some other things to be growing in,” said her father.

“I wish she would grow to some purpose then,” was the energetic reply.

“As the farmer said about his seed before it was time for it to sprout,” laughed the children’s father.

This father and mother could not talk confidentially together five minutes without bringing the “children” in.

Their own future was every day; but the children had not begun to live in theirs yet; their golden future, which was to be all the more golden because of their parents’ experiences.

This mother was so very old-fashioned that she believed that there was no career open to a girl beside marriage; the dreadful alternative was solitary old-maidenhood.  She was a good mother, in many respects a wise mother; but she would not have slept that night had she believed that either of her daughters would attain to thirty years unmarried.  This may have been owing to a defect of education, or it may have been that she was so happily married to a husband six years her junior—­whom she could manage.  And she was nearly thirty when she was married herself and had really begun to believe that she should never be married at all.  She believed marriage to be so honorable in all, that the absence of it, as in Miss Prudence’s case, was nearly dishonorable.  She was almost a Jewish mother in her reverence for marriage and joyfulness for the blessing of children.  This may have been the result of her absorbed study of the Old Testament Scriptures.  Marjorie had wondered why her mother in addressing the Lord had cried, “O, Lord God of Israel,” and instead of any other name nearer New Testament Christians, she would speak of him as “The Holy One of Israel.”  Sometimes I have thought that Marjorie’s mother began her religious life as a Jew, and that instead of being a Gentile Christian she was in reality a converted Jew, something like what Elizabeth would have been if she had been more like Marjorie’s mother and Graham West’s wife.  This type of womanhood is rare in this nineteenth century; for aught I know, she is not a representative woman, at all; she is the only one I ever knew, and perhaps you never saw any one like her.  She has no heresies, she can prove every assertion from the Bible, her principles are as firm as adamant and her heart as tender as a mother’s.  Still, marriage and motherhood have been her education; if the Connecticut, school-teacher had not realized her worth, she might have become what she dreaded her own daughters becoming—­an old maid with uncheerful views of life.  In planning their future she looked into her own heart instead of into theirs.

The children were lovely blossomings of the seed in the hearts of both parents; of seeds, that in them had not borne abundant fruitage.