Mrs. Megilp headed about, as if in the turn the talk had taken she suddenly found no thoroughfare; and asked Asenath if she had been to hear Rubinstein.

Of course it was not in talk only, that—­up-stairs or down-stairs—­the exceptional household found its difficulties.  It was not all pleasant arranging and contriving for an undeviating “living happy ever after.”

There were days now and then when the baby fretted, or lost her nap, and somebody had to hold her nearly all the time; when the door-bell rang as if with a continuous and concerted intent of malice.  Stormy Mondays happened when clothes would not dry, entailing Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays of interrupted and irregular service elsewhere.

If Asenath Scherman’s real life had been anywhere but in her home and with her children,—­if it had consisted in being dressed in train-skirt and panier, lace sleeves and bracelets, with hair in a result of hour-long elaboration, at twelve o’clock; or of being out making calls in high street toilet from that time until two; or if her strength had had to be reserved for and repaired after evening parties; if family care had been merely the constantly increasing friction which the whole study of the art of living must be to reduce and evade, that the real purpose and desire might sweep on unimpeded,—­she would soon have given up her experiment in despair.

Or if, on the other part, there had been a household below, struggling continually to escape the necessity it was paid to meet, that it might get to its own separate interests and “privileges,”—­if it had been utterly foreign and unsympathetic in idea and perception, only watchful that no “hand’s turn” should be required of it beyond those set down in the bond,—­resenting every occurrence, however unavoidable, which changed or modified the day’s ordering,—­there would speedily have come the old story of worry, discontent, unreliance, disruption.

But Asenath’s heart was with her little ones; she went back into her own childhood with and for them, bringing out of it and living over again all its bright, blessed little ways.

“She would be grown up again,” she said, “by and by, when they were.”

She was keeping herself winsomely gay and fresh against the time,—­laying up treasure in the kingdom of all sweet harmonies and divine intents, that need not be banished beyond the grave,—­although of that she never thought.  It would come by and by, for her reward.

She played with Sinsie in her baby-house; she did over again, with her, in little, the things she was doing on not so very much larger scale, for actual every day.  She invented plays for Marmaduke which kept the little man in him busy and satisfied.  She collected, eagerly, all treasures of small song and story and picture, to help build the world of imagination into which all child-life must open out.

As for Baby Karen, she was, for the most part, only manifest as one of those little embodiments that are but given and grown out of such loyal and happy motherhood.  She was a real baby,—­not a little interloping animal.  She was never nursed or tended in a hurry.  Babies blossom, as plants do, under the tender touch.