These two she would have liked to keep for ever just as they were, demons of wickedness, angels of delight, never to see them grow up into long-​legged monsters. Nothing made up up for the loss. When she read just now to James “ and there were numbers of soldiers with kettledrums and trumpets, ” and his eyes darkened, she thought, why should they grow up and lose all that? He was the most gifted, the most sensitive of her children. But all, she thought, were full of  

promise. Prue, a perfect angel with the others, and sometimes now, at night especially, she took one's breath away with her beauty. Andrew -- even her husband admitted that his gift for mathematics was extraordinary. And Nancy and Roger, they were both wild creatures now, scampering about over the country all day long. As for Rose, her mouth was too big, but she had a wonderful gift with her hands.

If they had charades, Rose made the dresses; made everything; liked best arranging tables, flowers anything. She did not like it that Jasper should shoot birds; but it was only a stage; they all went through stages. Why, she asked, pressing her chin on James's head, should they grow up so fast? Why should they go to school? She would have liked always to have had a baby. She was happiest carrying one in her arms. Then people might say she was tyrannical domineering, masterful, if they chose; she did not mind. And, touching his hair with her lips, she thought, he will never be so happy again, but stopped herself, remembering how it angered her husband that she should say that. Still, it was true.

They were happier now than they would ever be again. A tenpenny teaset made Cam happy for days.

She heard them stamping and crowing on the floor above her head the moment they awoke. They came bustling along the passage. Then the door sprang  

open and in they came, fresh as roses, staring, wide awake, as if this coming into the dining-​room after breakfast, which they did every day of their lives was a positive event to them, and so on, with one thing after another, all day long, until she went up to say good-​night to them, and found them netted in their cots like birds among cherries and raspberries, still making up stories about some little bit of rubbish -- something they had heard, something they had picked up in the garden. They all had their little treasures.... And so she went down and said to her husband, Why must they grow up and lose it all? Never will they be so happy again. And he was angry. Why take such a gloomy view of life?

he said. It is not sensible. For it was odd; and she believed it to be true; that with all his gloom and desperation he was happier, more hopeful on the whole, than she was. Less exposed to human worries --

perhaps that was it. He had always his work to fall back on. Not that she herself was “pessimistic,”

as he accused her of being. Only she thought life -- and a little strip of time presented itself to her eyes -- her fifty years. There it was before her -- life.

Life, she thought -- but she did not finish her thought. She took a look at life, for she had a clear sense of it there, something real, something private which she shared neither with her children nor with  

her husband. A sort of transaction went on between them, in which she was on one side, and life was on another, and she was always trying to get the better of it, as it was of her; and sometimes they parleyed (when she sat alone); there were, she remembered, great reconciliation scenes; but for the most part, oddly enough, she must admit that she felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.

There were eternal problems: suffering; death;

the poor.