Dr. Grey bent over his sister’s easy-chair, and, taking her thin, sallow face tenderly in his soft palms, kissed the sunken cheeks—the wrinkled forehead; and then, laying her head gently back upon its cushions, entered his buggy and drove to his office.
“Salome, what makes you look so moody? There are as many furrows on your brow as lines in a spider’s web, and your lips are drawn in as if you had dined on green persimmons. Child, what is the matter?”
Miss Jane lifted her spectacles from her nose, and eyed the orphan, anxiously.
“I am very sorry to hear that ‘Solitude’ will be filled once more with people, and bustle, and din. It is the nearest point where we can reach the beach, and I have enjoyed many quiet strolls under its grand, old, solemn trees. If haunted 66 at all, it is by Dryads and Hamadryads, and I like the babble of their leaves infinitely better than the strife of human tongues. Miss Jane, if I were only a pagan!”
“I am not very sure that you are not,” sighed the invalid.
“Nor I. I have lost my place,—I am behind my time in this world by at least twenty centuries, and ought to have lived in the jovial age of fauns and satyrs, when groves were sacred for other reasons than the high price of wood,—when gods and goddesses were abundant as blackberries, and at the beck and call of every miserable wretch who chose to propitiate them by offering a flask of wine, a bunch of turnips, a litter of puppies, or a basket of olives. Hesiod and Homer understood human nature infinitely better than Paul and Luther.”
“Salome, you are growing shockingly irreverent and wicked.”
“No, madam,—begging your pardon. I am only desperately honest in wishing that my salvation and future felicity could be secured beyond all peradventure, by a sacrifice of oatcakes, or white doves, or black cats, instead of a drab-colored life of prayer, penance, purity, and patience. I don’t deny that I would rather spend my days in watching the gorgeous pageant of the Panathenaea, or chanting dithyrambics to insure a fine vintage, or even offering a Taigheirm, than in running neck and neck with Lucifer for the kingdom of heaven. I love kids, and fawns, and lambs, as well as Landseer; but I should not long hesitate, had I the choice, between flaying their tender flesh in sacrifice and mortifying my own as a devout life requires.”
“But what would have become of your poor soul if you had lived in Pagan times?”
“What will become of it under present circumstances, I should be exceedingly glad to know. ‘The heathen are a law unto themselves,’ and I sometimes wish I had been born a Fejee belle, who lived, was tastefully tattooed, and died without having even dreamed of missionaries,—those officious martyrs who hope to wear a whole constellation on their foreheads as a reward for having been eaten by cannibals, to whom 67 they expounded the unpalatable doctrine that, ‘this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light.’ Moreover, I confess—”