Note 63 — Chapter Thirty-nine

... for a wiry kind of power of endurance, I have never known Mother’s equal. The least-robust member of all her husky family, it seemed to us as if, at sixty, her capacity for hard work had reached its peak. Remonstrate as we would, Mother began her day somewhere between four and five of the sleetiest, bitterest mornings. It was the only subject upon which I ever knew Father to be ugly with her. It angered and dismayed and humiliated him, as it did us all, for that matter.

Perhaps if Mother had taken better care of herself, she might have lived to even a riper old age. And yet, who knows but what the very rigors to which she subjected herself, were not the secret of her endurance. Thank God again and again that she at least lived to see the first of the great days for us that were to be followed by one epochal event after another.