“I suppose, after all,” mother mused on, surreptitiously wiping those prideful eyes, “that there is something in Inspiration, and the dear child just had to wait till she got it, and that she doesn't know any more than we do where it came from.”
“No, I daresay she doesn't.” But sometimes father was more like a friend than a parent, and that faint, unnoted stress was the only sign he ever gave of what he knew about this Inspiration.
CHAPTER X. MISSY CANS THE COSMOS
As far back as Melissa Merriam could remember, she had lived with her family in the roomy, rambling, white-painted house on Locust Avenue. She knew intimately every detail of its being. She had, at various points in her childhood, personally supervised the addition of the ell and of the broad porch which ran round three sides of the house, the transformation of an upstairs bedroom into a regular bathroom with all the pleasing luxuries of modern plumbing, the installation of hardwood floors into the “front” and “back” parlours. She knew every mousehole in the cellar, every spider-web and cracked window-pane in the fascinating attic. And the yard without she also knew well: the friendly big elm which, whenever the wind blew, tapped soft leafy fingers against her own window; the slick green curves of the lawn; the trees best loved by the birds; the morning-glories on the porch which resembled fairy church bells ready for ringing, the mignonette in the flower-beds like fragrant fairy plumes, and the other flowers—all so clever at growing up into different shapes and colours when you considered they all came from little hard brown seeds. And she was familiar with the summerhouse back in the corner of the yard, so ineffably delicious in rambler-time, but so bleakly sad in winter; and the chicken-yard just beyond she knew, too—Missy loved that peculiar air of placidity which pervades even the most clucky and cackly of chicken-yards, and she loved the little downy chicks which were so adept at picking out their own mothers amongst those hens that looked all alike. When she was a little girl she used to wonder whether the mothers grieved when their children grew up and got killed and eaten and, for one whole summer, she wouldn't eat fried chicken though it was her favourite delectable.
All of which means that Missy, during the seventeen years of her life, had never found her homely environment dull or unpleasing. But, this summer, she found herself longing, with a strange, secret but burning desire, for something “different.”
The feeling had started that preceding May, about the time she made such an impression at Commencement with her Valedictory entitled “Ships That Pass in the Night.” The theme of this oration was the tremendous influence that can trail after the chancest and briefest encounter of two strangers. No one but herself (and her father, though Missy did not know it) connected Missy's eloquent handling of this subject with the fleeting appearance in Cherryvale of one Ridgeley Holman Dobson. Dobson had given a “Lyceum Course” lecture in the Opera House, but Missy remembered him not because of what he lectured about, nor because he was an outstanding hero of the recent Spanish-American war, nor even because of the scandalous way his women auditors, sometimes, rushed up and kissed him. No. She remembered him because... Oh, well, it would have been hard to explain concretely, even to herself; but that one second, when she was taking her turn shaking hands with him after the lecture, there was something in his dark bright eyes as they looked deeply into her own, something that made her wish—made her wish—
It was all very vague, very indefinite. If only Cherryvale afforded a chance to know people like Ridgeley Holman Dobson! Unprosaic people, really interesting people. People who had travelled in far lands; who had seen unusual sights, plumbed the world's possibilities, done heroic deeds, laid hands on large affairs.
But what chance for this in poky Cherryvale?
This tranquil June morning, as Missy sat in the summerhouse with the latest Ladies' Home Messenger in her lap, the dissatisfied feeling had got deeper hold of her than usual. It was not acute discontent—the kind that sticks into you like a sharp splinter; it was something more subtle; a kind of dull hopelessness all over you. The feeling was not at all in accord with the scene around her. For the sun was shining gloriously; Locust Avenue lay wonderfully serene under the sunlight; the iceman's horses were pulling their enormous wagon as if it were not heavy; the big, perspiring iceman whistled as if those huge, dripping blocks were featherweight; and, in like manner, everybody passing along the street seemed contented and happy. Missy could remember the time when such a morning as this, such a scene of peaceful beauty, would have made her feel contented, too.