was, unlike the others, sentimental, though he had never once allowed his mother the joy of discovering it. It was a thing which he thought shameful.
Even he had caught a sense of her terrible desolation.
There is a rhythm in life, a certain beauty which operates by a variation of lights and shadows, happiness alternating with sorrow, content with discontent, distilling in this process of contrast a sense of satisfaction, of richness that can be captured and pinned down only by those who possess the gift of awareness. Old Gramp in his solitude knew well its workings, and Ellen, in Paris, had become, as the tempo of her own life began to lose its intensity, to understand it dimly. For Hattie, in the fretful ebb and flow of her existence there could never be such knowledge. This rhythm, this beauty, existed outside her, a thing apart, beyond the wall of her consciousness.
Gramp, in his solitude, knew too that there were in each life hills and valleys and, rising above them all, one peak which pierced the clouds. Out of the depths of his uncanny perception he came to understand that Hattie's life had passed its solitary peak. It had begun now to slip down the other side; what remained could be but a gradual falling away, a gentle decline until the end. What he knew from the summit of a monstrous detachment came to Hattie vaguely through her senses; she knew it as she knew the approach of damp weather by its effect upon her rheumatism. It was that sense of having passed from one room into another, with the door behind her closed and bolted forever.
And Ellen. . . . She too stood now on the summit, for ambition had been the beginning and end of her existence. She had accomplished; she had won. There would never be another peak so lofty, so enveloped in heady invigorating air; nor one so lonely. But there remained the things which lie always on the opposite slope of the peak—the things which the wise, like Gramp, place above all the hurry, the scramble, the headlong turmoil of the long ascent. There were the gentle pastures of reflection, of
