"
"What a very odd idea!" exclaimed Mrs. Slater, regarding her friend with
astonishment.
Miss Ludington flushed slightly as she replied, "I don't think it half so
odd, and not nearly so repulsive, as your notion, that we old women are
the mummies of the girls who came before us. It is easier, as well as far
sweeter, for me to believe that our youth is somewhere immortal, than
that it has been withered, shrivelled, desiccated into our old age. Oh,
no, my dear, Paradise is not merely a garden of withered flowers! We
shall find the rose and lily of our life blooming there."
The hours had slipped away unnoticed as the friends talked together, and
now the lengthening shadows on the school-room floor recalled Miss
Ludington to the present, and to the duties of a hostess.
As they walked slowly across the green toward the homestead, she told her
friend more fully of this belief in the immortality of past selves which
had so recently come to her, and especially how it had quite taken away
the melancholy with which she had all her life before looked back upon
her youth.
Pages:
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54