“Who spoke of envying them, Albert? Not I, I’m sure! The house will do famously for our temporary use. Yet it puzzles me a little to know where I am to stow these two children of Melissa’s.”
“Pooh! That can be easily managed. Leonora can have a mattress put down for her in the upper entry; and as for the five-year-old, Albert, my namesake, he can throw himself down anywhere,—in the wood-shed, if need be. Indeed, his mother tells me she found him, the other night, sleeping on the boards of the piazza, in order, as he said, to harden himself to be a soldier. How is poor Purling this morning?”
“His wound seems to be healing, but he’s deplorably low-spirited; so Melissa tells me.”
“Low-spirited? But we mustn’t allow it! The man who could fight as he did at Fair Oaks ought to be jolly for the rest of his life, even though he had to leave an arm behind him on the battle-field.”
“It isn’t his wound, I suspect, that troubles him, but the state of his affairs. The truth is, Purling is fearfully poor, and he’s too honest to run in debt. His castles in the air have all tumbled in ruins. Nobody will buy his books, and his publishers have all failed.”
“But he can’t help that. The poor fellow has done his best, and I maintain that he has talents of a certain sort.”
“Perhaps so, but his forte is not imaginative writing.”
“Then let him try history.”
“But I repeat it, my dear Albert, imaginative writing is not his forte.”
“Ah! true. You are getting satirical, Mrs. Pompilard. Our historians, you think, are prone to exercise the novelist’s privilege. Let us go up and see the Major.”