"It is old enough, that is all the question. Do you know all about Holland when that plate first came into existence?"
"That plate will be a good point to begin with. You and I will study up Holland some day. I wonder what you know about it now."
"Is that why your friend wants the plate, because she knows about Holland two hundred years ago?"
"No; I'm afraid not. I don't believe she knows more than you do about it. But she will delight in the plate. Which reminds me, your uncle has promised to put the unfortunate pitcher together for me. And in its mended condition it will appear more ancient than ever. I cannot say that George Washington broke it with his little hatchet; but I can have a legend about you connected with it, and tell it to your grandchildren when I show it to them fifty years hence. Unto them I will discover--not a swan's nest among the reeds, as Mrs. Browning has it, but an old yellow pitcher that their lovely grandmother was in trouble about fifty years ago."
"It will be a hundred and fifty years old then," returned Marjorie, seriously, "and I think," she added rebukingly, "that _you_ were building castles then."
"I had you and the pitcher for the foundation," said Miss Prudence, in a tone of mock humility.
"Don't you think--" Marjorie's face had a world of suggestion in it--"that 'The Swan's Nest' is bad influence for girls? Little Ellie sits alone and builds castles about her lover, even his horse is 'shod in silver, housed in azure' and a thousand serfs do call him master, and he says 'O, Love, I love but thee.'"
"But all she looks forward to is showing him the swan's nest among the reeds! And when she goes home, around a mile, as she did daily, lo, the wild swan had deserted and a rat had gnawed the reeds. That was the end of her fine castle!"
"'If she found the lover, ever, Sooth, I know not, but I know She could never show him, never, That swan's nest among the reeds,'"
quoted Marjorie. "So it did all come to nothing."
"As air-castles almost always do. But we'll hope she found something better."
"Hasn't God things laid up for us better than we can ask or think or build castles about?"
"I _hope_ so," said Marjorie; "but Hollis Rheid's mother told mother yesterday that her life was one long disappointment."