"I'm not the sort of person you want," he answered, chuckling at my allusion to the fire question. "I've sense enough to know that without being a woman. Why don't you ask Tom Webbe?"
I confessed that I had thought of Tom, but—And there I stuck, for I could hardly tell the deacon how I thought gossip had already said enough about Tom and myself without my giving folk any more to talk about.
"I don't know what that 'but' means," he remarked, grinning more than ever, as if he did know perfectly. "Anyway, there's nobody in town who could do it so well. All the men and boys like him, and he has a level head. He's the only one of the young fellows that's been to college, and he ought to know more about books than any of the rest of them. Besides, he needs something to take up his mind."
I felt the deacon was right, and I began to ask myself whether my personal feelings should be allowed to count in such a matter. Still I could hardly make up my mind to take the responsibility of putting Tom at the head of a reading-room I had started. If nothing else were to be considered I did not want my connection with the plan to be too prominent, and gossip about Tom would be just the thing to keep my name always to the front.
"I hope you are sensible enough to do one thing," Deacon Daniel went on, "and that is to have everybody who uses the room pay for it. It needn't be much, but they'll respect it and themselves more if they pay something, and it'll give them the right to grumble."
"I don't want them to grumble," I returned.
"Oh, nobody cares much for anything he can't grumble about," was his reply, with a laugh; "but really they are twice as likely to grumble if you pay for everything than if they help. That's the way we are made."
I told him that he was an old cynic, but I saw in a moment he was right about the value that would be put on a thing which was paid for. If the men feel they are helping to support the reading-room they will take a good deal more interest in it.
"Tom Webbe will manage them all right," the deacon declared. "He'll let them grumble just enough, and make them so contented they'll think they're having their own way while he's going ahead just the way he thinks best. He's the only man for the place."
Perhaps he is; and indeed the more I think about it, the more I see the deacon is right. It would certainly be good for Tom, and that is a good deal. I wonder what I ought to do?