She let herself be coddled now by her friends of the new
generation; there were days when she seemed to want nothing better than
to sit by Olive's fire and ramble on about the old struggles, with a
vague, comfortable sense--no physical rapture of Miss Birdseye's could
be very acute--of immunity from wet feet, from the draughts that prevail
at thin meetings, of independence of street-cars that would probably
arrive overflowing; and also a pleased perception, not that she was an
example to these fresh lives which began with more advantages than hers,
but that she was in some degree an encouragement, as she helped them to
measure the way the new truths had advanced--being able to tell them of
such a different state of things when she was a young lady, the daughter
of a very talented teacher (indeed her mother had been a teacher too),
down in Connecticut. She had always had for Olive a kind of aroma of
martyrdom, and her battered, unremunerated, un-pensioned old age brought
angry tears, springing from depths of outraged theory, into Miss
Chancellor's eyes. For Verena, too, she was a picturesque humanitary
figure. Verena had been in the habit of meeting martyrs from her
childhood up, but she had seen none with so many reminiscences as Miss
Birdseye, or who had been so nearly scorched by penal fires.
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