It was a brave way to begin the day, and it carried her over the first part of it so cheerfully that Mrs. Sherman began to think that she had overestimated Betty's disappointment. It surely could not have been as overwhelming as she imagined. She did not know how many times that day Betty's courage failed her. Edryn's high-sounding words seemed like a hollow mockery and she brooded over the failure till she began to grow morbid and ultra-sensitive.
Late that afternoon Mrs. Sherman met her in the back hall with the manuscript in her hands. She was on her way to put it in the kitchen stove. Promptly rescuing it, Mrs. Sherman finally obtained her reluctant consent to let her read it.
"It is your right," said Betty bitterly, "no matter how much it humiliates me. You have done everything for me, lavished everything on me as if I were really your daughter, and I have disappointed you at every turn. I couldn't be the brilliant social success you hoped for, it was useless to try. And I couldn't be the success in literature you had a right to expect, though I did try that with all my soul, mind and strength. I've been thinking about it all day, and I made up my mind at last, that I'd burn up that miserable story that I wasted so many months on, and then I'd go to you and tell you that under the circumstances it would be better for me to go away, and not be an expense to you any longer. As long as there was a prospect of my amounting to something some day that would make you proud of me, that would repay you in part for all you've done, I didn't mind deepening my obligation to you, but now—"
She turned to the window to hide her face, but the next instant she found herself sitting on the top stair with her head on her godmother's shoulder, listening to such loving remonstrances that they should have driven away the last vestige of her bitter self-condemnation. It did help wonderfully to hear that her godmother and Papa Jack were not disappointed in her though grieved for her disappointment; that they loved her for her own dear little self alone, and not for the things they hoped she would achieve, and that they couldn't let her go away, for nobody could ever fill the place of their dear little daughter Betty.
She wiped her eyes after awhile and smiled like an April day, but she still persisted that she must go away somewhere and teach if only to prove that she was good for something.
Much troubled by her evident distress, Mrs. Sherman finally went to talk the matter over with the old Colonel. Mr. Sherman was away from home. Several days after she called Betty into her room.
"Papa has read your manuscript," she said, "and he thinks it would be a good thing to let you have your own way, and go off somewhere for awhile. He says that in his opinion your writing shows unusual promise, and that its only lack is the lack of nearly all young writers, your ignorance of life. You must know more of the world before you can have a message for it that it will stop to listen to. You must live and grow and gain experience, and he thinks the best way for you to do all that, is to depend on your own resources for awhile, and that the kindest thing we can do is to open the cage and give the little bird a chance to try its own wings. It will never learn to fly as long as we keep it hedged about so carefully.
"He finally convinced me by quoting that legend of 'Camelback Mountain' to me. He says you are like Shapur now, a vendor of salt who as yet can only follow in the train of others—write what has already been written. You haven't the wares with which to gain a royal entrance to the City of your Desire. You need some desert of waiting in which to learn the secret of Omar's alchemy."
"I know," said Betty. "I know now what my writing lacks—the attar that gained him his royal entrance." She quoted softly, "'And no man fills his crystal vase with it until he has first been pricked by the world's disappointments and bowed by its tasks.'"
"Oh, Betty, my dear little girl," said Mrs. Sherman taking the earnest face between her hands and looking down fondly into the trusting brown eyes raised to hers. "I suppose it's true, but I can't help wanting to save you from the pricks and the burdens. Still I won't stand in your way. Go ahead, little Shapur, and may the golden gates swing wide for you, for I know you'll force them open some day, with the filling of your crystal vase."