By the
time you are fifty, with a family of half a dozen children, you have
become comparatively impersonal as "father" or "mother." It is tacitly
recognised that your life-work is finished, that your ambitions are
accomplished or not, and that your hopes are at an end.
The young Mesuriers, for example, were all eagerly hastening towards
their several futures. They were garrulous over them at every meal. But
to what future in this world were James and Mary Mesurier looking
forward? Love had blossomed and brought forth fruit, but the fruit was
quickly ripening, and stranger hands would soon pluck it from the
boughs. In a very few years they would sit under a roof-tree bared of
fruit and blossom, and sad with falling leaves. They had dreamed their
dream, and there is only one such dream for a lifetime; now they must
sit and listen to the dreams of their children, help them to build
theirs. They mattered now no longer for themselves, but just as so much
aid and sympathy on which their children might draw. Too well in their
hearts they knew that their children only heard them with patience so
long as they talked of their to-morrows.
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