There can scarcely be a subject touched, in ever so light a way,—especially a moral or a spiritual subject,—in however small a company of persons, that shall not set in motion varied and intense currents of thought; bear diverse and searching application to consciousness and experience. The Josselyns sat silent with the long breadths of green cambric over their laps, listening with an amusement that freshened into their habitual work-day mood like a willful little summer breeze born out of blue morning skies, unconscious of clouds, to the oddities of Sin Saxon; but the drift of her sayings, the meaning she actually had under them, bore down upon their different knowledge with a significance whose sharpness she had no dream of. "Plain over-and-over,"—how well it illustrated what their young days and the disposal of them had been. Miss Craydocke thought of the darns; her story cannot be told here; but she knew what it meant to have the darns of life fall to one's share,—to have the filling up to do, with dexterousness and pains and sacrifice, of holes that other people make!
For Leslie Goldthwaite, she got the next word of the lesson she was learning,—"It depends on what one is willing to let get crowded out."
Sin Saxon went on again.
"I've had a special disgust given me to superiority. I wouldn't be superior for all the world. We had a superior specimen come among us at Highslope last year. She's there yet, it's commonly believed; but nobody takes the trouble to be positive of it. Reason why, she took up immediately such a position of mental and moral altitude above our heads, and became so sublimely unconscious of all beneath, that all beneath wasn't going to strain its neck to look after her, much less provide itself with telescopes. We're pretty nice people, we think, but we're not particularly curious in astronomy. We heard great things of her, beforehand; and we were all ready to make much of her. We asked her to our parties. She came, with a look upon her as if some unpleasant duty had forced her temporarily into purgatory. She shied round like a cat in a strange garret, as if all she wanted was to get out. She wouldn't dance; she wouldn't talk; she went home early,—to her studies, I suppose, and her plans for next day's unmitigated usefulness. She took it for granted we had nothing in us but dance, and so, as Artemus Ward says, 'If the American Eagle could solace itself in that way, we let it went!' She might have done some good to us,—we needed to be done to, I don't doubt,—but it's all over now. That light is under a bushel, and that city's hid, so far as Highslope is concerned. And we've pretty much made up our minds, among us, to be bad and jolly. Only sometimes I get thinking,—that's all."
She got up, giving the string of rings a final whirl, and tossing them into Leslie Goldthwaite's lap. "Good-by," she said, shaking down her flounces. "It's time for me to go and assert myself at Shinar. 'L'empire, c'est moi!' Napoleon was great when he said that. A great deal greater than if he'd pretended to be meek, and want nothing but the public good!"
"What gets crowded out?" Day by day that is the great test of our life.
Just now, everything seemed likely to get crowded out with the young folks at Outledge but dresses, characters, and rehearsals. The swivel the earth turned on at this moment was the coming Tuesday evening and its performance. And the central axis of that, to nearly every individual interest, was what such particular individual was to "be."
They had asked Leslie to take the part of Zorayda in the "Three Moorish Princesses of the Alhambra." Jeannie and Elinor were to be Zayda and Zorahayda. As for Leslie, she liked well enough, as we know, to look pretty; it was, or had been, till other thoughts of late had begun to "crowd it out," something like a besetting weakness; she had only lately—to tell the whole truth as it seldom is told—begun to be ashamed, before her higher self, to turn, the first thing in the morning, with a certain half-mechanical anxiety toward her glass, to see how she was looking. Without studying into separate causes of complexion and so forth, as older women given to these things come to do, she knew that somehow there was often a difference; and beside the standing question in her mind as to whether there were a chance of her growing up to anything like positive beauty or not, there was apt often to be a reason why she would like to-day, if possible, to be in particular good looks. When she got an invitation, or an excursion was planned, the first thing that came into her head was naturally what she should wear; and a good deal of the pleasure would depend on that. A party without an especially pretty dress didn't amount to much; she couldn't help that; it did count with everybody, and it made a difference. She would like, undoubtedly, a "pretty part" in these tableaux; but there was more in Leslie Goldthwaite, even without touching upon the deep things, than all this. Only a pretty part did not quite satisfy: she had capacity for something more. In spite of the lovely Moorish costume to be contrived out of blue silk and white muslin, and to contrast so picturesquely with Jeannie's crimson, and the soft, snowy drapery of Elinor, she would have been half willing to be the "discreet Kadiga" instead; for the old woman had really to look something as well as somehow, and there was a spirit and a fun in that.
The pros and cons and possibilities were working themselves gradually clear to her thoughts, as she sat and listened, with external attention in the beginning, to Sin Saxon's chatter. Ideas about the adaptation of her dress-material, and the character she could bring out of, or get into, her part, mingled themselves together; and Irving's delicious old legend that she had read hundreds of times, entranced, as a child, repeated itself in snatches to her recollection. Jeannie must be stately; that would quite suit her. Elinor—must just be Elinor. Then the airs and graces remained for herself. She thought she could illustrate with some spirit the latent coquetry of the imprisoned beauty; she believed, notwithstanding the fashion in which the story measured out their speech in rations,—always an appropriate bit, and just so much of it to each,—that the gay Zorayda must have had the principal hand in their affairs; must have put the others up to mischief, and coaxed most winningly the discreet Kadiga. She could make something out of it: it shouldn't be mere flat prettiness. She began to congratulate herself upon the character. And then her ingenious fancy flew off to something else that had occurred to her, and that she had only secretly proposed to Sin Saxon; an illustration of a certain ancient nursery ballad, to vary by contrast the pathetic representations of "Auld Robin Gray" and "The Lady of Shalott." It was a bright plan, and she was nearly sure she could carry it out; but it was not a "pretty part," and Sin Saxon had thought it fair she should have one; therefore Zorayda. All this was reason why Leslie's brain was busy, like her fingers, as she sat and sewed on the green curtain, and let Sin Saxon talk. Till Miss Craydocke said that "something always gets crowded out," and so those words came to her in the midst of all.
The Josselyns went away to their own room when the last rings had been sewn on; and the curtain was ready, as had been promised, at ten o'clock. Leslie stayed, waiting for Dakie Thayne to come and fetch it. While she sat there, silent, by the window, Miss Craydocke brought out a new armful of something from a drawer, and came and placed her Shaker rocking-chair beside her. Leslie looked around, and saw her lap full of two little bright plaid dresses.