Autobiography Of An Elderly Woman PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1911 edition. Excerpt: ... AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN ELDERLY WOMAN CHAPTER I THE SHADOW OF AGE As I look back over my life, it divides itself into four parts. First come all the years before I married, and as I look back on my childhood and my short girlhood, it seems to me as though I were remembering the life of some other woman, for during these many years I know that I have changed several times from one person to another, and the world about me has had time to change also. All that early part swims in a fog, with here and there events popping out of the mist, more distinct than those a week past, -- often meaningless and trivial events these; I cannot tell by what caprice memory has elected to keep them so clear. Lately I find myself returning to certain opinions and prejudices of my girlhood, that I had long forgotten. Time, after all, has not obliterated them, nor have I walked away from them. It is rather as though I had gone in a circle, and as I come to the completion of it I find my old thoughts and opinions, changed and grown older, waiting for me. With my marriage begins the part of my life that seems real to me, -- it is as if I had dreamed all that went before. I loved the time when my children were little, and I have often wished that I could put them and myself back in the nursery again. I pity the women whose children come too late for them all to be in some sense children together. But however young a mother is, there is a great gap between her and her babies. My little children were of a different generation from me. And for all our striving to understand, they were babies and my husband and I "grown people," though as I look back we seem mere boy and girl. We worried over our babies, -- there were four of them, all in the nursery at the same time, ...