How would it be when they had heard from Mr. Thayne what she felt sure they must hear,—when they had to leave Greenley Street and go into that cheap little lodging-room, and she had to stay away from her mother all day long?
She remembered the time when she had thought it would be nice to have a "few things;" nice to earn her own living; to be one of the "Other Girls."
CHAPTER XXXI.
CHOSEN: AND CALLED.
Desire Ledwith found nobody at home at Mr. Vireo's. The maid-servant said that she could not tell when they would return. Mrs. Vireo was at her mother's, and she believed they would not come back to tea.
Desire knew that it was one of the minister's chapel nights. She went away, up Savin Street, disappointed; wishing that she could have sent instant help to Mary Moxall, who, she thought, could not withstand the evangel of Hilary Vireo's presence. It is so sure that nothing so instantly brings the heavenly power to bear upon a soul as contact with a humanity in which it already abides and rules. She wanted this girl to touch the hem of a garment of earthly living, with which it had clothed itself to do a work in the world. For the Christ still finds and puts such garments on to walk the earth; the seamless robes of undivided consecration to Himself.
As Desire crossed to Borden Street, and went on up the hill, there came suddenly to her mind recollection of the Sunday noon, years since, when she had walked over that same sidewalk with Kenneth Kincaid; when he had urged her to take up Mission work, and she had answered him with her girlish bluffness, that "she thought he did not approve of brokering business; it was all there, why should they not take it for themselves? Why should she set up to go between?" She thought how she had learned, since, the beautiful links of endless ministry; the prismatic law of mediation,—that there is no tint or shade of spiritual being, no angle at which any soul catches the Divine beam, that does not join and melt into the next above and the next below; that the farther apart in the spectrum of humanity the red of passion and the violet of peace, the more place and need for every subdivided ray, to help translate the whole story of the pure, whole whiteness.
She remembered what she had said another time about "seeing blue, and living red." She was thinking out by the type the mystery of difference,—the broken refractions that God lets his Spirit fall into,—when, looking up as she was about to pass some person, she met the face of Christopher Kirkbright.
He had not been at home of late; he had been busy up at Brickfield Farms.