"Now, that's good," said Desire, "and cute of you, too, that last piece of a sentence. If you had stopped at 'patiently,' as people generally do! That's what exasperates; when you want to do something with all your might. It almost seems as if I could, when you put it so."
"It is a 'stump,' Luclarion would say."
"Luclarion is a saint and a philosopher. I feel better," said Desire.
She stayed feeling better all that afternoon; she helped Sulie Praile cut out little panels from her thick sheet of gray painting-board, and contrived her a small easel with her round lightstand and a book-rest; for Sulie was advancing in the fine arts, from painting dollies' paper faces in cheap water colors, to copying bits of flowers and fern and moss, with oils, on gray board; and she was doing it very well, and with exquisite delight.
To wait, meant something to wait for; something coming by and by; that was what comforted Desire to-day, as she walked home alone in the sharp, short, winter twilight; that, and the being patient with all one's might. To be patient, is to be also strong; this she saw, newly; and Desire coveted, most of all, to be strong.
Something to wait for. "He does not cheat," said Desire, low down in her heart, to herself. For the child had faith, though she could not talk about it.
Something; but very likely not the thing you have seen, or dreamed of; something quite different, it may be, when it comes; and it may come by the way of losing, first, all that you have been able yet, with a vague, whispering hope, to imagine.
The things we do not know! The things that are happening,—the things that are coming; rising up in the eastward of our lives below the horizon that we can yet see; it may be a star, it may be a cloud!
Desire Ledwith could not see that out at Westover, this cheery winter night, it was one of dear Miss Pennington's "Next Thursdays;" she could not see that the young architect, living away over there in the hundred-year-old house on the side of East Hill, a boarder with old Miss Arabel Waite, had been found, and appreciated, and drawn into their circle by the Haddens and the Penningtons and the Holabirds and the Inglesides; and that Rosamond was showing him the pleasant things in their Westover life,—her "swan's nest among the reeds," that she had told him of,—that early autumn evening, when they had walked up Hanley Street together.