"Oh," said the girl, sympathetically (falling inflection).
"I have been there a year, and I trust when I came away I left light behind."
"Oh yes."
"At present I have no situation, though I have one in view. They are most anxious to have me, but I say to myself, 'Will I do the most good there? Is it a place where my influence will carry the most weight?' For we should all do the best we can with our talents, it is a duty; I do the best I can with mine."
"Oh yes, I reckon so. And you speak so beautifully too. Perhaps you've spoken?—I mean before people?"
"Never in public," answered the other voice, reprovingly; "to my pupils, but never in public. I think a woman should always keep her life secluded, she should be the comfort and the ornament of a purely private home. We do not exhibit our charms—which should be sacred to the privacy of the boudoir—in the glare of lecture-rooms; we prefer to be, and to remain, the low-voiced, retiring mothers of a race of giant sons whom the Muse of History will immortalize in the characters of soldier, statesman, and divine."
"Oh yes," said the girl's voice again, in good-natured, if inattentive, acquiescence.
Winthrop glanced back. The young girl was charmingly pretty, with a sweet indifference in her eyes. The older woman—she was over fifty—was of a martial aspect, broad-shouldered, large-boned, and tall; her upper lip was that of a warrior, her high cheek-bones had an air of resolute determination. Comfort and ornament of a purely private home, as she had just proclaimed herself, it seemed almost as if her powers would be wasted there; she was a woman to lead an army through a breach without flinching. The giant sons in her case were presumably imaginary, for she gave her name to her companion as they parted: "Miss Louisa Mearns—they call me Lulette." Her voice was very soft and sweet.
"Southerner, of course, with those lovely tones," was Winthrop's mental comment as she passed, stepping rather delicately, and, tall as she was, without any stride. "But she's got a thorough soul of Maine, though she doesn't dream of it. There must have been transmigration somewhere among her ancestors." And then from sheer weariness and restlessness he went into another car.
His feeling was that this train would be in North Carolina a week. But it got on. It traversed South Carolina and Georgia, it passed through the cotton country, it crossed beautiful rivers rolling slowly towards the sea, then it made a wide detour round Okefinokee swamp, and at last brought him again to the margin of the broad St John's. It seemed to him that half a lifetime had passed since he left it.