“Better wait till I’m elected, Sue,” Nathan replied, and then, seeing Susan’s face cloud over with disappointment, added more cheerfully:
“Of course I don’t care if you have the child, but you mustn’t get to countin’ on this thing. That’s th’ trouble with these here fool politics: they get folks t’ countin’ on things that can’t come around.”
Long after his wife was asleep, however, he mused upon the prospects of going to Topeka, and for her sake he wanted to go. Nathan Hornby always spoke of his chances of being elected to the legislature of his state deprecatingly. He swaggered and pretended to be indifferent, but the worm of desire burrowed deeper every time Topeka was mentioned. The very fact that he was uneducated, and, as the Democrats had said, unfit, made him desire it the more. Criticism had aroused the spirit of contest in him. Also he wanted Susan, now that she had begun to plan for it, to have it. Nathan Hornby knew that the woman he had married was his superior, and loved her for it. Masculine jealousy he did not know. He would have been sincerely glad to have had her elected to the legislature of Kansas instead of himself.
“It’s like Sue t’ want t’ take th’ girl,” he meditated, the next day in the cornfield. “She’ll see Katie in every girl she sees for th’ rest of ’er days, I reckon. I wouldn’t ’a’ had no show at Topeka, nohow, if she hadn’t ’a’ made Wallace feel good ’bout that crazy thing he calls ’is wife. Curious how big things hinge on little ones. Now Sue had no more idea o’ gettin’ a nomination t’ th’ legislature for me than that hen she was foolin’ with this mornin’.” Later, he remembered the thing that had worried him before the subject of Topeka came up. “Wonder what I done that set that youngster t’ lookin’ at me so funny?”
Mrs. Hornby had not set her heart on going to Topeka foolishly, but she wanted to go and it entered into all her plans. She did not tell the young girl of her plans at once, but waited for her to make her place in Nathan’s heart, as she was sure she would do. On that point the girl succeeded surprisingly. Her knowledge of horses, of harness, of farm subjects in general made good soil for conversation with her host, and her love for the motherless colt called her to the barn and made special openings for communications. Nathan called the colt, which was of the feminine gender, Pat, because its upper lip was so long, and that too the girl enjoyed, and entered into the joke by softening the name to Patsie. They were good friends. Having decided to befriend her, the man’s interest in her increased. She was to be theirs. The sense of possession grew with both husband and wife. Already they had cast their lot with the child, and when at last they put the question of the high school to her, the friendship was firmly welded by the extravagance of its reception.
“Think of it! Think of it! Only think of it! I didn’t know how it was going to come about, but I was sure I was going to get it somehow!” the young girl cried, dancing about the room excitedly. “Whenever I was afraid something was going to keep me from it, I used to say, ‘I will! I will! I will go to high school!’ Oh, isn’t it too lovely! Do you think my saying it made any difference?” she asked eagerly; and the quaint couple, who were born two generations in advance of the birth cry of New Thought, laughed innocently and made no reply.
When the floodgates of surprise and emotion were opened, and she began to talk of her hopes and fears, it was but natural that she should speak of her struggles for personal improvement, though this was instinctively done when Mr. Hornby was absent.
Curiously enough, some of her points of information were as helpful to Susan Hornby as they had been to her. Mrs. Hornby knew the rules of good grammar, but many little observances of table manners had changed since her youth. She read and was well informed on general topics of the day, but her life for more than fifteen years had been spent with Nathan and with the hired men who ate at her table, and she had become careless of small things, so that she listened with an amused smile, but with real profit as well, to Lizzie’s confidences that “You shouldn’t cross your knife and fork on your plate when you are through eating, like the hired men, but lay them side by side, neat and straight”; that “You shouldn’t eat with your knife, neither,” and that “To sip your coffee out of your saucer with a noise like grasshoppers’ wings was just awful!” She, too, was brushing up to go to Topeka, and while much in advance of her husband or any of her associates in society matters, she had lived the life of the farm, and to the end of her existence would be conscious of the inequalities of her education. Of this she said nothing to the child, but listened and remembered. Occasionally she reminded the girl that they might not go to Topeka, but even as she warned she was quickening the subconscious mind to aid in recording any fact which might be advantageous when she herself got there, and her love for the child grew. The girl was part of the scheme. In a week she had become one of the family.
At the end of the week Mr. Farnshaw did not appear; farm matters had detained him, so that the opportunity for a closer acquaintance with his daughter was permitted. Under Mrs. Hornby the child blossomed naturally. The old-fashioned secretary was the young girl’s delight. Seeing her shaking in silent glee over “David Copperfield” one night, and remembering her eager pursuit of intellectual things, Mrs. Hornby remarked to her husband, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” The world of to-day would add to Susan Hornby’s little speech, “Not only as a man thinketh in his heart, so is he,” but “So shall he live, and do, and be surrounded.” This simple daughter of the farm, the herds, and the homesteaded hills of bleak and barren Kansas, where the educated and intellectual of earth were as much foreigners as the inhabitants of far off Russia or Hindustan, had by her thought not only prepared herself for the life she coveted, but had compelled the opportunity to enter upon her travels therein. When Mr. Farnshaw arrived, Mrs. Hornby was fortunate in the form of her request to take his daughter with her, and it was arranged that if they went to Topeka the child should be a member of their household.
“We’ll be just as good to her as if she were our own,” she promised, and then added reflectively, “We’re going to call her her full name too. Elizabeth was my mother’s name. It’s so much prettier than Lizzie.”