“Why no.”
“It is the giving of one’s best. It may also mean the ability to appreciate, when another gives of the best he has.”
“But can you like the work? Pardon me, but it has always seemed to me a hint of a second or third rate mind when one can be happy with such common pleasures. There, no doubt I have offended you.”
“If we were always looking for our own perfect satisfaction, it would not be. But, ‘No man liveth to himself,’ only.”
“Miss Endicott, I don’t wonder you like my brother Stephen. After all,” rather doubtfully, “isn’t there a good deal of cant preached?”
“Only believe. All the rest will be added,” I said hurriedly.
The church bell was ringing its middle peal. There was a long pause then it took up a sweet and rather rapid jangle, subsiding into the slow swells of tender melody. We always called it the middle peal and began to get ready, as that gave us just time to go to church. I rose now, and uttered a pleasant good night.
“Say a little prayer for me, if you don’t think I am too wicked;” he murmured faintly, turning his face away.
How peculiar he was! When I thought him softening, he was always sure to draw back into his shell again, and his confidences invariably came unexpectedly. Then too, they puzzled me, I was not fit to cope with them. They seemed to jar and jangle with the every day smoothness of my own life.
Mr. Ogden was at church alone that evening, and though the Maynard girls were there, walked home in our circle. I was going to stay with Fannie, but Dick Fairlie was on the other side of her, and George and Allie West swallowed me up in the narrow path.