"Is he really trying to unsettle Miss Willy's mind?" questioned the teacher anxiously. "How on earth could she go out sewing by the day if she didn't have her religious convictions?"
"That's just what I asked him," returned Susan, who, besides being dangerously clever, had a remarkably level head to keep her balanced. "But he answered that until people got unsettled they would never move, and when I wanted to find out where he thought poor little Miss Willy could possibly move to, he only got impatient and said that I was trying to bury the principle under the facts. We very nearly quarrelled over Miss Willy, but of course she took the book to please Oliver and couldn't worry through a line of it to save her soul."
"Did he say anything about his work? What he wants to do, I mean?" asked Virginia, and her voice was so charged with feeling that it gave an emotional quality to the question.
"He wants to write," replied Susan. "His whole heart is in it, and when he isn't talking about reaching the people, he talks about what he calls 'technique.'"
"Are you sure it isn't poetry?" inquired Miss Priscilla, humming back like a bee to the tempting sweets of conjecture. "I've always heard that poetry was the ruination of Poe."
"No, it isn't poetry—not exactly at least—it's plays," answered Susan. "He talked to me till twelve o'clock last night while we were arranging his books, and he told me that he meant to write really great dramas, but that America wasn't ready for them yet and that was why he had had to sell his clothes. He looked positively starved, but he says he doesn't mind starving a while if he can only live up to his ideal."
"Well, I wonder what his ideal is?" remarked Miss Priscilla grimly.
"It has something to do with his belief that art can grow only out of sacrifice," said Susan. "I never heard anybody—not even Jinny's father in church—talk so much about sacrifice."
"But the rector doesn't talk about sacrifice for the theatre," retorted the teacher, and she added with crushing finality, "I don't believe there is a particle of sense in it. If he is going to write, why on earth doesn't he sit straight down and do it? Why, when little Miss Amanda Sheppard was left at sixty without a roof over her head, she began at once, without saying a word to anybody, to write historical novels."
"It does seem funny until you talk with him," admitted Susan. "But he is so much in earnest that when you listen to him, you can't help believing in him. He is so full of convictions that he convinces you in spite of yourself."