And she woke with that feeling; she was eager to be up, to be out in the sunshine. Annie, she found, had gone early to town with her vegetables. Ruth helped eleven-year-old Dorothy, the eldest child, get off for school and walked with her to the schoolhouse half a mile down the road. The little girl's shyness wore away and she chatted with Ruth about school, about teachers and lessons and play. Ruth loved it; it seemed to set the seal of a human relationship upon her new feeling. What a wonderful thing for Annie to have these children! Today gladness in there being children in the world went out past sorrow in her own deprivation. The night before she had said to Annie, "You have your children. That makes life worth while to you, doesn't it?" And Annie, with that hard, swift look of being ruthless for getting at the truth--for getting her feeling straight and expressing it truly, had answered, "Not in itself. I mean, it's not all. I think much precious life has gone dead under that idea of children being enough--letting them be all. _We_ count--_I_ count! Just leaving life isn't all; living it while we're here--that counts, too. And keeping open to it in more than any one relationship. Suppose they, in their turn, have that idea; then life's never really lived, is it?--always just passed on, always _put off_." They had talked of that at some length. "Certainly I want my children to have more than I have," Annie said. "I am working that they may. But in that working for them I'm not going to let go of the fact that I count too. Now's my only chance," she finished in that grim little way as one not afraid to be hard.
Thinking back to that it seemed to Ruth a bigger mother feeling than the old one. It was not the sort of maternal feeling to hem in the mother and oppress the children. It was love in freedom--love that did not hold in or try to hold in. It would develop a sense of the preciousness of life. It did not glorify self-sacrifice--that insidious foe to the fullness of living.
Thinking of that, and going out from that to other things, she sat down on a log by the roadside, luxuriating in the opulence and freshness of the world that May morning, newly tuned to life, vibrant with that same fresh sense of it, glad gratefulness in return to it, that comes after long sickness, after imprisonment. The world was full of singing birds that morning,--glorious to be in a world of singing birds! The earth smelled so good! There were plum trees in bloom behind her; every little breeze brought their fragrance. The grass under her feet was springy--the world was vibrant, beautiful, glad. The earth seemed so strong, so full of still unused powers, so ready to give.
