How she would like to do that! She counted over the girls she liked best. There were nine, and ten would form a society, bound fast together. This she regarded as a very promising new thought. But what should it be for? Jean pondered a great deal, but she could think of nothing but her “outing.”
Her outing! Why shouldn’t it be an Outing Society—not to get up real vacations for people, but to get them out of themselves, and into the way of helping things along, and beginning right at home. For that was the curious part of it—that you didn’t have to go away anywhere. It seemed to come to you.
Jean resolved to call on the girls and tell them about it, and ask them to come to her house and talk it over. She knew now what she would call it: The Outing Ten.
First she would call at the Parsonage and tell Miss Marion about it, and ask her what to do first and next.
But she could not tell Miss Marion about it all herself; perhaps Judith Mackenzie would go; Judith knew Miss Marion better than any of the girls. She was always staying at the Parsonage “for company” for Miss Marion.
“Say not ‘small event’! Why ‘small’? Costs it more pain than this, ye call A ‘great event,’ should come to pass, Than that? Untwine me from the mass Of deeds which make up life, one deed Power shall fall short in or exceed!”
On the lounge in the sitting-room, Judith lay cuddled up with a rare ailment for her, a throbbing headache; Aunt Affy had brought a pillow from her own entry bedroom, and bathed her forehead with Florida water; then brushed her hair for a long time and told her a story about her far-away girlhood, “when Becky and Cephas and I had our good times. Not that we don’t have good times now; Becky has hers up yonder, and poor Cephas and I do the best we can for each other down here.”
Judith wondered why she should say “poor Cephas”; he had laughing eyes, and a merry laugh, and everything that happened to him seemed just the very best thing that could happen.
Aunt Rody had brewed a bowl of bitter stuff and stood threateningly near while Judith lifted her dizzy head and forced herself to taste it.
She tasted several times with a look of pitiful appeal that Aunt Rody resisted.
“I can’t,” sobbed Judith, but she obeyed, and Aunt Rody set the yellow bowl on a chair by the sofa, that she might taste it whenever she felt like it.