"Well, I'm just running over a few items in order to remind you that most troubles aren't half as black as your feelings paint them at the time. It's best not to worry over spilt milk till you see it's made a grease-spot. Ten to one the cat will lick it up,—and it's an ill wind that blows nobody good. There,—that figure of speech is as mixed as a plum-pudding, but it has a heap of sound philosophy!"
Blue Bonnet was smiling now. "I wish all the preachers would say the kind of things you do. Most of the sermons I've heard sound like that last piece of mine—'variations on one theme'—and the theme is Duty with a big D. Sarah was brought up on those. And they must be pretty successful, for Sarah is awfully good. Isn't she?"
"Just that—awfully good."
She looked up quickly, struck by something odd in his tone; but he was perfectly sober.
"She's the salt of the earth," he added, "and you—"
"And what am I?"
He smiled down at her. "Do you remember how the south pasture looks when the blue bonnets bloom in March,—how fresh and sweet, a sky turned upside down—? It's the glory of the ranch, Honey. And what they are to the ranch, you are to me. Please don't be trying to be something you can't be, Blue Bonnet!"
She laughed outright. "That sounds like the Duchess in 'Alice in Wonderland.' Don't you remember?"
"I confess I don't. You've been neglecting my education, young lady, since you began your own. What does the Duchess say?"
"'Be what you would seem to be'—or, if you want it put more simply—'Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'" The face she turned to him as she finished was cloudless, and he breathed a sigh of relief.