She dreamed out a whole dream of life that might grow up beside this help; of work that might be done there. She forgot that she was lingering, and keeping Mr. Kirkbright lingering, behind the others.
"You would have to live here yourself, I should think," she said at length, speaking out of her vision of the things that might be, and so—would have to be. She had got drawn in to the contemplation of the scheme, and had begun to weigh and arrange, involuntarily, its details, forgetting that she "knew not anything."
Mr. Kirkbright smiled.
"Yes, I see where you are," he said, "I had arrived at precisely the same point myself. But the 'right people at the other end?' Who should they be? Who shall send me my villagers,—my workers? Who shall discriminate for me, and keep things true and unconfused at the source?"
"Your sister, Mr. Vireo, Luclarion Grapp," Desire repeated, promptly.
"And yourself?"
"Yes; I and Hazel, all we can. We help them. And now there will be Miss Argenter. As Hazel said,—'We all of us know the Muffin-man.' How queer that that ridiculous play should come to mean so much with us! Luclarion Grapp is actually a muffin-woman, you know?"
"I'm afraid I don't know the Muffin-man literally, except what I can guess of him by your application," said Mr. Kirkbright, laughing. "I've no doubt I ought to, and that it would do me good."
"You will have to come to Greenley Street, and find him out. Hazel and Miss Craydocke manage all the introductions, as having a kind of proprietorship; 'and quite proper, I'm sure'—Why, where are Miss Kirkbright and Miss Argenter?"
Coming back to light common speech, she came back also to the present circumstance; reminded also, perhaps, by her "quite proper" quotation.