Then Timothy related how for a week past Elsie had bought foodstuffs every time she went to the village, and refused to give them to him to carry around to the kitchen afterward. Julia had assured him they were never ordered by her; so of course Miss Elsie took them to her room. Where else could she keep them?
Bertha would have nothing to do with that idea. Indeed, it was impossible there could be any such food supply as Timothy described in Elsie’s room, for Bertha knew every inch of that dainty apartment, and kept it in order. Still, she had respect for Timothy, and could not doubt his word when he insisted that Elsie actually had bought bread and eggs, lettuce, oil, and nuts and brought them home with her in the car. “What she does with ’em’s none of our business, that I can see,” she volunteered. “Feeds the birds in the gardens and orchard perhaps. She’s that unselfish! She’s probably even kinder to the birds than to human beings.”
But every one laughed at this explanation. You don’t feed birds eggs and oil and nuts! No, there was some mystery about it. Julia had felt mystery in the air for a week past, and not just because of Elsie’s queer purchases and the puzzle of what became of them, either. Mystery was simply “in the air.” Julia “felt” it.
Timothy nodded his head knowingly. Timothy was Irish and very romantic. “What can you expect?” he asked. “In a house with two young things like that! Why, they’ve just come out of the Fairyland of their childhood, they’re standing now on the edges of life. What can you expect but mystery? They’re all mystery.”
“I don’t mean that kind of mystery, Timothy,” Julia protested. “I mean regular down-and-out mystery. I feel it in my bones. You wait and see if I’m not right.”
Effie had returned from the dining-room again. “Miss Frazier’s telling them about Rome now,” she said. “She says she’ll take them both there together sometime, if Miss Kate’s mother’ll let her go. She said ‘Katherine’ just as easy as though it didn’t hurt a bit and as though it might be any name. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind our speaking it now. Things are changing.”
It was true. Things were changing with Miss Frazier. She sat at the head of her table to-night a light-hearted, spirited person. And she was more than that. She was intensely interesting. She said she meant soon to begin to travel, really to travel and see the world. Arabia attracted her, and all Asia. A book by a man named Ferdinand Ossendowski had lately stimulated her roving instincts and enthralled her imagination. Why should she not explore a totally different civilization from the one she had been born into! She recounted some of Ossendowski’s exploits, adventures, and escapes, and his stories of the “King of the World.” As she talked a panorama entirely new to her listeners unrolled before their minds’ visions. What a place this world was, what a place to be alive in, and what a time to be alive! How the importance of personal affairs evaporated in the face of such contemplation! The girls were as stirred as Miss Frazier herself apparently had been stirred; they were lifted out of themselves. They felt that the world was a challenge, that life was a challenge—a glorious one. For the time the party, drawing so near now, sank into insignificance.
But Miss Frazier, looking at their eager faces, suddenly remembered. She said, “Katherine wouldn’t let me take you to such out-of-the-way places yet, Kate, and of course I wouldn’t want to. But when we go to Rome——” Then she had talked about Rome and places nearer home. But in speaking of them she touched them with a new light and interest. Kate’s dream, as most girls’ dreams, had often been of some day going “abroad.” Such an adventure in contemplation had always seemed the very height of happiness to her. But now, Miss Frazier’s conversation lent travel new glamour, for Miss Frazier was steeped in history, the history of nations and religions and art, and her idea of travel was not simply of adventure into lands, but into realms of imagination, and into the past.
“Would you girls like to travel with me for a summer—perhaps next summer?” she asked.
Kate’s joy at such a prospect was too great to allow of words. She simply glowed at Aunt Katherine. But Elsie suddenly turned away her head. Somehow then, in that instant, the spell was broken. The dinner table with the diners floated back to Miss Frazier’s house in Oakdale, Massachusetts, and there they sat, consuming “cottage pudding” with lemon sauce, dressed and ready for a party.