"Think, all around the world."
"Well," with a half laugh and a sound like a sigh not going very deep, "there would be travel all round the world. I hope some day to earn money enough to go—well I'll take London first. Then Paris, but I do not believe I shall want to stay there long, for you see I shall not have a great deal of money. And then Rome, dear delightful Rome, with all its old haunts, where its poets have lived and died. And that isn't half, is it? Is any life long enough to see it all?"
Her face was in a glow of enthusiasm, her eyes deep and luminous.
The woman had not begun very early in life and she had seen a good deal of it. She had heard hundreds of people wish for things, but very few who were willing to earn them, like this girl who had so little envy in her composition.
"Suppose someone would say to you, here is a school where you can be taught all the higher branches as well, music, drawing, painting, literature and all the pretty society ways that make one feel at home in any company. Would you go?"
"Oh, that is like a fairy dream," and she laughed with charming softness. "Why, I am afraid to look at it lest I should want it."
"That isn't answering my question."
She raised her face and studied the one above her. It was wrinkled and the eyes were a faded blue-gray. She did not guess the eyebrows were penciled, the lips tinted, that the hair just a little sprinkled with white had come from the hair-dresser's. The curious asking expression transfixed her.
She drew a long breath. "Why, that would be wonderful to happen to a poor girl who is thinking how she can work her way along. It would be like a glimpse of heaven. I should be crazy to refuse it."
Mrs. Van Dorn took both of the warm, throbbing hands in hers. "Listen," she exclaimed. "I like you very much. When you first came, I thought only of a little maid to wait upon me, and run up and down and stay with Joanna when I wanted to be alone. I was rather curious to know whether you understood what you were about when you recited 'Hervé Riel.' You have a great deal of natural or inherited intelligence—your father was a scholar. If you were two or three years older, I should take you abroad with me and finish you on the Continent, that is, if you had not too much self-assurance that growing girls arrogate to themselves so easily. But that is not to be thought of at present—it must be some dream of the future. You need real education and you are capable of assimilating the higher part of it. I should like to send you to a school I know of where you will get the best of training. And if you develop into the girl I think you will, there may be a future before you better than any of your vague dreams."