My Virtual Reading Room

"...No doubt about it, it was great fun being a mother. It was like having your own life over again--with a great deal of the agonies of youth left out. Since you knew how little some things mattered, you could smile indulgently over the crises that arose.

"But really, Mother," Sarah would say intensely, "it's frightfully serious. You mustn't smile. Nadia feels that the whole of her future is at stake!"

But at forty-one, one had learned that one's whole future was very seldom at stake. Life was far more elastic and resilient than one had once chosen to think.

During her service with an ambulance during the war, Ann had realized for the first time how much the small things of life mattered. The small envies and jealousies, the small pleasures, the chafing of a collar, a chillblain inside a tight shoe--all these ranked as far more immediately important than the great fact that you might be killed at any moment. That should have been a solemn, an overwhelming thought, but actually one became used to it very quickly--and the small things asserted their sway--perhaps heightened in their insistence just because, in the background, was the idea of there being very little time. She had learned something, too, of the curious inconsistencies of human nature, of how difficult it was to assess people as "good" or "bad" as she had been inclined to do in her days of youthful dogmaticism. She had seen unbelievable courage spent in rescuing a victim--and then that same individual who had risked his life would stoop to some mean petty theft from the rescued individual he had just saved.

People, in fact, were not all of a piece.

(from "A Daughter's a daughter" by Agatha Christie, writing under the name of Mary Westmacott)