“Well, they’ll be different enough, won’t they?” remarked Carin. “They were different sort of folk before they crossed the Atlantic, and their differences grew after they settled here. And yet here Azalea and I are, as alike as can be.”
“But I don’t think the differences of the colonists grew, Carin,” said Azalea, “and I’m terribly afraid you and I aren’t alike. I couldn’t be like you if I tried for ever and ever.” She gave a wistful sigh, and Miss Parkhurst, watching her without seeming to do so, saw the light of hero-worship in her eyes. She knew that Azalea was one of those who are born to love hungrily, and to live eagerly; and she was thankful that, having so hungry a heart, she was able, when it came to a matter of opinion, to form her own ideas, and to hold to them. Azalea’s heart was in leading strings to Carin, but her excellent little brain went on its independent way, though Carin had traveled and studied, and been all her life with charming and cultivated people, and Azalea had been tended no more than a patch of wayside daisies.
Miss Parkhurst brought the books they were needing from the library, and Carin taking hers, sighed happily: “Isn’t it beautiful to be here by ourselves—just the three of us? No one else would fall into our way of doing. How nice it is of you, Miss Parkhurst, to let us follow up whatever idea we’re interested in, and to help us learn all we can about that subject, instead of making us dash from one thing to another, till we haven’t a notion what we are trying to learn. I’d never get anywhere, studying in the old-fashioned way, jumping from subject to subject, and having to wait for a whole class of stupid creatures to come tagging along.”
“But you might be the stupid one, you know, Carin,” smiled Miss Parkhurst. “I’m afraid it doesn’t do to go around the world supposing yourself to be the cleverest one.”
Carin shrugged her pretty shoulders.
“I don’t think that,” she said. “I always think Azalea the cleverest one. I’m only saying that we three understand each other, and that we don’t have to spend half our time explaining, and that we’re just as contented together as mortals can be.”
And just then the door opened and Mrs. Carson came into the room. Her face had lost something of the look of transparency it had worn when she first came to Lee, when she had been fresh from a terrible sorrow, but it was still pale and strangely tender to Azalea’s admiring eyes.
“I do hope you’ll excuse me, Miss Parkhurst,” she said in her soft voice, “for breaking into the study hour. But I’ve something important to talk over, and so I’ve come while all the members of the academy are together.”
She shook hands with Azalea as she spoke, and patted Carin caressingly on the shoulder.
“I’ve come,” she went on, “to talk to you about taking in another girl.”