thinner; she was certainly slightly bald about the temples, and white hairs were straggling in one after another, not attempting to conceal themselves.  A year ago she had selected them from the mass of black and cut them short, but now they were appearing too fast for the scissors.  It was a sad face, almost a gloomy one, that she was gazing into:  for the knowledge that her forty years had done their work in her face as surely, and perhaps not as sweetly as in her life had come to her with a shock.  She was certainly growing older and the signs of it were in her face, nothing could hide it, even her increasing seriousness made it more apparent; not only growing older, but growing old, the girls would say.  Twenty years ago, when she first began to write that birthday record, she had laughed at forty and called it “old” herself.  As she laid the hand-glass aside with a half-checked sigh, her eyes fell upon her hand and wrist; it was certainly losing its shapeliness; the fingers were as tapering as ever and the palm as pink, but—­there was a something that reminded her of that plate of old china.  She might be like a bit of old china, but she was not ready to be laid upon the shelf, not even to be paid a price for and be admired!  She was in the full rush of her working days.  Awhile ago her friends had all addressed her as “Prudence,” but now, she was not aware when it began or how, she was “Miss Prudence” to every one who was not within the nearest circle of intimacy.  Not “Prudie” or “Prue” any more.  She had not been “Prudie” since her father and mother died, and not “Prue” since she had lost that friend twenty years ago.

In ten short years she would be fifty years old, and fifty was half a century:  old enough to be somebody’s grandmother.  Was she not the bosom friend of somebody’s grandmother to-day?  Laura Harrowgate, her friend and schoolmate, not one year her senior, was the grandmother of three-months-old Laura.  Was it possible that she herself did not belong to “the present generation,” but to a generation passed away?  She had no daughter to give place to, as Laura had, no husband to laugh at her wrinkles and gray hairs, as Laura had, and to say, “We’re growing old together.”  If it were only “together” there would be no sadness in it.  But would she want it to be such a “together” as certain of her friends shared?

Laura Harrowgate was a grandmother, but still she would gush over that plate from Holland two centuries old, buy a bracket for it and exhibit it to her friends.  A hand-glass did not make her dolorous.  A few years since she would have rebelled against what the hand-glass revealed; but, to-day, she could not rebel against God’s will; assuredly it was his will for histories to be written in faces.  Would she live a woman’s life and adorn herself with a baby’s face?  Had not her face been moulded by her life?  Had she stopped thinking and working ten years ago she might, to-day, have looked at the face she looked at ten years ago.