Explore "The Mother's Recompense" by Edith Wharton on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Anne's sojourn in Washington prolonged itself for a fortnight. Her letters to her mother, though punctual, were inexpressive; but that was not her fault, Kate knew. She had inherited from her father a certain heaviness of pen, an inability to convey on paper shades of meaning or of feeling, and having said: "Isn't it splendid about Lilla? " had evidently exhausted the subject, or rather her power of developing it.
At length she returned, bringing with her some studies of magnolias that were freer and more vigorous than any of her previous work. She greeted her mother with her usual tenderness, and to Kate her coming was like a lifting of clouds and opening of windows; the mother had never supposed that anything in her life could ever again strike such deep roots as this passion for her daughter. _Perfect love casteth out fear! _ "Does it? _How does any one know? _" she had often incredulously asked herself. But now, for the first time, love and security dwelt together in her in a kind of millennial quiet.