She noticed a slight difference in the cast of talk. They all seemed uneasily aware that the world was moving. Mostly they disapproved and foreboded. She cast her mind back to that winter of '93-'94. It had been the terrible winter of unemployment, strikes, widespread discontent. She remembered clearly how Powhatan had declaimed then against "upsetters" and what the country was coming to. But now she heard him and the Bishop's nephew agree that anti-Christ and ruin were modern inventions. They sighed for the halcyon past. "Even ten or twelve years ago, sir, men were content enough!"
Rachel--Rachel had not sat still. Rachel had climbed. She was the old Rachel, but sweetened and broadened. There was left something of her old manner; she had her broodings that to the casual eye seemed half-sullen; at the end of long silences she might flare out, send at table or elsewhere a flaming, unexpected arrow, but her old ways were like old clothes, kept half-negligently, worn from habit, while all the time a fairer, more lately woven garment was in the wardrobe. She looked no older; she was slight and brown and somehow velvety. Hagar called her a pansy. She was no longer tragic, or tragedy had become but a dim background, a remembered cloud. And she was the strong, sane, and actual comrade of her children.
Betty and Charley.... Charley was blind. Charley and Betty had changed, changed more than anybody. Betty stood a frank, straight young Diana, what she said and did ringing true. Charley was the student. He had his shelves of Braille, and his mother's eyes and voice were his at call. Just now they were doing general history together--that was what Charley wanted, to be a historian. Charley and Betty claimed Hagar for their own. There were her Christmas letters every year--wonderful letters--and her Christmas gifts, small choice things from every land. They worshipped her, too, with frankness because she had "done something"--because her name counted. Oh, they were very ambitious, Betty and Charley; filled with ideas, glorious for the new time, ready to push the world with vigour! "Oh," cried Hagar, "don't they make you feel timid, cautious, and conservative?"
She watched with interest to see what effect the two had upon Powhatan and Bessie. She was forced to the conclusion that they had very little. They angered Powhatan sometimes, and he would strike the table and deplore the days of silent reverence. But he was desperately proud of Betty's looks, and he had an odd, sneaking pity and fondness for Charley, and Hagar gathered that he would have sadly missed them out of the house. As for Bessie, she only gave her sleepy smile, and said that all children talked foolishly, but that you didn't have to listen.