“Bring her here for a week and I’ll promise that she will.”
“Aunt Affy could not spare her. Her yellow head is the sunshine of that old house. But I’ll have her some day. I wish I _owned_ her.”
“I wish you did. I would buy her myself if I had money enough.”
“I wonder who _does_ own her,” said Marion; “I forgot that she does not belong to anybody.”
“She does belong to somebody. Her mother gave her to Aunt Affy.”
Perhaps she belonged somewhat to her “Cousin Don.”
Roger never talked about Don. He never read aloud to her the foreign letters she saw so often on the study table.
A sigh came of itself before she could stifle it; the idle fingers opened the magazine; Roger’s pen began to race across the paper. Voices on the piazza brought Marion to her feet; Judith’s voice was in the hall.
“O, Miss Marion, we came to tell you—” began Judith.
“To make an Outing Ten,” finished Judith.
At the tea-table Marion told Roger the story of how Jean had an outing.
“I wish you might have heard the unconscious way she told it. My life _is_ like Africa: all beaten tracks. I am to be the President of the Outing Ten. All Bensalem is to be my own special private outing, but nobody is to know it.”
“Then, Marion dear, you will have the two most blessed things on the earth.”
“You think work is one,” she said doubtfully.
“So you think. And companionship is the other.”
“Roger, dear, I’m afraid I haven’t given you companionship; I’ve been stupid, self-absorbed, idle—”
“Then there is only one blessed thing to you,” she said, merrily. “May you get it.”
“Then you do not inwardly fret against the limitations of this bit of a village—” she began, frightened at herself for the suggestion: “I thought, perhaps, you were _bearing_ Bensalem.”
“So I am, I hope,” he answered, gravely, “in my heart, and in my prayers.”
“I beg your pardon,” she returned, flushing under the “splendid purpose in his eyes.” “I might have known you were too broad to feel narrowed, as I do.”
“You remember what Lowell says: ‘There are few brains that would not be better for living for a while on their own fat.’”
“And that is better than the fat of the land—which you will never get in Bensalem.”
“I think I started from my new standpoint without worldly ambition. Think of Paul writing the Epistle to the Romans from a literary point of view.”