A Week in the Future

I have often observed that unmarried people, old maids and old bachelors,
take a keener interest in old family history, and in the ramifications of
the successive generations from the most remote ancestors they can claim,
than those who form the actual links in the chain of descent, and leave
children behind them to carry on the chronicle. Having lived all my life
with a mother who nearly attained the age of a century, and having a
strong interest in things past as well as in things present, I have been
steeped in memories of old times. I know how middle-class intelligent
people lived and worked, dressed and dined, worshipped God and amused
themselves, what they read for pleasure and for profit, not only so far
as her own recollections could carry the dear old lady, but two
generations farther back. In her youth she had lived much with an
intelligent grandmother, who could recollect the rebellion of 1745, and
the battle of Prestonpans, and had been of mature years during the American
War of Independence.

My own mother's youth had been the period of the gigantic struggle of
Great Britain, sometimes single-handed, against the power of the first
Napoleon. The older lady had said to her then youthful descendant that no
one could expect to see as much as she had seen in her life, which
extended from 1734 to 1817, and included the American War, the French
Revolution, and the application of machinery to so many of the arts. The
grandchild, born at the beginning of 1791, had seen five French
Revolutions, and the map of Europe strangely altered; triumphs of art and
science, countless in number; steam, gas, electricity, the railway
system; mechanical inventions which had revolutionized industry; and the
rise of mighty colonies to compensate for the loss of the United States.
In the growth of one great colony she had taken a deep personal interest,
for she had watched it from the day of very small things in 1839. As we
sat and talked together, we would wonder what there could be for me to
see that would be equal to what had unfolded before her eyes. Was there
to be federation or disintegration? Was the homogeneous yet heterogeneous
British Empire to be firmly welded together, or were the component parts
to be allowed peacefully to separate and form new states? Was the
_régime_ of unrestricted competition and free trade and individualism to
be kept up, or were these to be exchanged for protection and
collectivism? What was to be the outcome of the Irish Question, of German
Socialism, of Russian Nihilism? Was Britain to remain mistress of India,
and to keep that dependency? Was she to annex all territory which might
be supposed to preserve her open route towards it? What struggle was
there to be in central Asia between Britain and Russia? What power was
likely to demolish the terrible armed peace of Europe? Such questions as
these occupied my own mind primarily--my mother had taken the keenest
interest in them all, but latterly she cared less for the questions of
the day, and as her health gradually declined, she went further and
further back till she seemed to live more in the first ten years of the
century than in the more recent past.

When, after a long, wearing, and painful illness, I closed my mother's
eyes--my companionship and occupation both gone at once--I had to
consider how I was to take up my life again. I was poorer after her
death, because her annuity, which must have made the insurance company
the losers, died with her, and I was left with that sort of provision
which the world considers quite sufficient for an elderly single woman.

My brother Robert came the day after the funeral to talk matters over
with me. "You have had a shock, Emily," he said, "You would not save
yourself any way;--now, you must try to take life easier. What do you
yourself think of doing?"