Virginia, who had been looking with her rapt gaze down the deserted street, quivered at the words as if they had stabbed her.
"But he wants to be a writer, Susan," she protested. "A great many very nice people are writers."
"Then why doesn't he go about it in a proper way, if he isn't ashamed of it?" asked the teacher, and she added reflectively after a pause, "I wish he'd write a good history of the war—one that doesn't deal so much with the North. I've almost had to stop teaching United States history because there is hardly one written now that I would let come inside my doors."
"He doesn't want to write histories," replied Susan. "Father suggested to him at supper last night that if he would try his hand at a history of Virginia, and be careful not to put in anything that might offend anybody, he could get it taught in every private school in the State. But he said he'd be shot first."
"Perhaps he's a genius," said Virginia in a startled voice. "Geniuses are always different from other people, aren't they?"
"I don't know," answered Susan doubtfully. "He talks of things I never heard of before, and he seems to think that they are the most important things in the world."
"What things?" asked Virginia breathlessly.
"Oh, I can't tell you because they are so new, but he seems on fire when he talks of them. He talks for hours about art and its service to humanity and about going down to the people and uplifting the masses."
"I hope he doesn't mean the negroes," commented Miss Priscilla suspiciously.
"He means the whole world, I believe," responded Susan. "He quotes all the time from writers I've never heard of, and he laughs at every book he sees in the house. Yesterday he picked up one of Mrs. Southworth's novels on mother's bureau and asked her how she could allow such immoral stuff in her room. She had got it out of the bookcase to lend to Miss Willy Whitlow, who was there making my dress, but he scolded her so about it that at last Miss Willy went off with Mill's 'Essay on Liberty,' and mother burned all of Mrs. Southworth's that she had in the house. Oliver has been so nice to mother that I believe she would make a bonfire of her furniture if he asked her to do it."