“I thought they ought to go red, white and blue,” said Gale, “like the colors in the flag. But, see here, Johnnie, what do you think of Mr. Chase’s scheme, anyway? Ain’t it a bully chance for opening our business on a big scale?”
“Please don’t, Daddy,” protested Miss Gale. “Mr. Chase must have a very unfair opinion of us from what you have told him. He must stay to luncheon, and learn to know us better.”
At this point Mr. Sturritt rose and excused himself.
“I am not really a missionary, you know,” Edith Gale continued. “In fact not at all. I have just a little hobby—a very little one—of helping people to better ideals through a truer appreciation of the beautiful in nature.” She said this quite unaffectedly—much as a child would explain a little game of its own. I nodded eagerly and she proceeded.
“It has always seemed to me that the people who see only firewood in trees, weather-signs in skies, and water-supply in rivers, miss a good deal of what is best in this world, and are perhaps not so well prepared for what they find in the next. And sometimes even those who care in a way for the beauties of the earth and sky miss a good deal of them, or care not in the best way. Sometimes they cut their trees into queer shapes, or chop away all the pretty tangle of foliage from a river bank, or lay out their gardens with a square and compass. I sketch and paint a little, and now and then I try to make people realize the beauty as well as the usefulness of nature, and that it’s a waste of time to do all those artificial things to it. It is quite simple to explain with pictures, you know, like an object lesson, and I show them that star-shaped flower-beds, and bare river banks, and ornamentally trimmed trees do not make as pretty pictures as they would the other way, and then sometimes I go further and say that maybe children, and grown folks, too, would be better and less artificial themselves if they were taught to care less for nature in its unnatural forms, and more as God made it. Your dream of an Antarctic world and an undiscovered race is very fascinating to me. I, also, have long had a dream of finding such a people, though it is far more likely that I should go to them to learn than to teach.”
Chauncey Gale had been watching her admiringly while she spoke. As for myself, if there had been one thing needed to complete my conversion, it was this revelation of her gentle doctrines. Gale, however, could not be long repressed.
“You’ve no idea how that sort of thing takes with commuters,” he said reverentially. “It’s sold more additions for me than all my advertising put together.”
“Oh, Daddy, how can you!”
“Look at that air of innocence,” said Gale, “it would deceive the oldest man living. You know very well, Johnnie, that the Bilgewater lots would never have moved in the world if you hadn’t gone out there and got those people all crazy on art values. Why, the art value of every lot in Bilgewater doubled in ten days, and they went off like chromos at a picture auction.”
“Papa!” said Miss Gale severely, “I went to Bridgewater, or Bilgewater, as you persist in calling it, and showed the people my pictures out there, because I was invited to do so, and because I saw by their lawns and gardens that they needed me. I had no thought of the material value and sale of your old lots, I can assure you, and I don’t believe my going made a particle of difference. If I had thought it possible, I shouldn’t have gone.”