in the step of it; then, encouraging as a mother bird flying ahead, watchful as a drill sergeant, she led them swinging around the room, counting ‘one and two and three and fo-ur and two-step in and two-step out,’ like a professional dancing teacher. Properly or not, she had them all fox-trotting in ten minutes. Then she told them to try it together and when she went to demonstrate this Peter was there. As far as I can learn he hasn’t been far away ever since.
“This happened just two weeks ago. Driving through, you don’t see the effect on the neighborhood yet—but it’s already visible enough in Peter. He’s going after the power-line now in a way that can’t fail to bring it within the next year, and the Summers won’t have to sell the old homestead—a calamity that they were beginning to fear themselves. There will be many other cases that we don’t hear about, and all because several communities, including a town, pooled their social interests.”
“Rather heavy stuff, all this community investigation,” Billy remarked as they drove away. “I started out with the idea of impressing you with the freedom and restfulness of country life, and we’ve found nothing but responsibility. It would seem that every socially minded person going to the country should go with the spirit of a foreign missionary.”
“They’d be dreadful nuisances if they did,
though. All the worth-while things seem to have just grown out of someone’s wanting other people to be happy. You don’t go after it like a profession. You don’t try to see the whole world at once—just your own little corner. First, your own family—you want them to be happy because you like them; then your own neighbors—you want them to be happy because you know them. It works out wonderfully in a natural little way of its own, too. When you’re very happy you want everyone else to have the same things that make you happy. That’s why it’s the best first investment a woman can make for the world to keep the fires warm in her own house. You can’t imagine a family quarrelling among themselves and wanting to take in a tramp, can you?”
“And I suppose a family self-centred is almost as bad as an individual self-centred. But next week let’s let our friend judge his own plots while we do some of this linking up with city advantages which he says is so important to a broadened outlook. Let’s see ‘Dear Brutus.’ After all this researching into the whereforeness of failures in a community we ought to be prepared for the theme. How is it it goes? ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves.’ Sounds like some more sermonizing, but if it is it will be fairly subtle.”
CHAPTER XIX.
“One can miss the best happiness of marriage because one travels through it in kid gloves, Pullman cars, first-class staterooms, and grand hotels. Rich, city-bred, voluntarily childless, one can mince through marriage as sightseers promenade in a forest on a gravelled path with hand-rails, signposts, and seats. On the other hand, one may know marriage as Kipling’s Mowgli knew the forest, because he travelled as well in the tree-tops as on the springy ground.”—Dr. Richard Cabot, in “What Men Live By.”
With “Dear Brutus” there was the usual surprised delight when the curtain rose, at the birds and sunshine in the English garden, the piquant fascination of the dwarf magician, then the unfolding of the tragedy of the failure-lives begging a second chance, and the whimsical fairy tale of the enchanted garden—the land of “Might Have Been.”
Billy was accustomed to the impulsive touch of a hand on his sleeve, at the high spots in plays, not a nervous, bothersome little hand, but a warm electric contact as quickly withdrawn while the girl kept her eyes fast on the stage. Sometimes he lost the effect of half the best acting in his amusement at watching her, like a child actually living for the moment in the drama going on before her. He was accustomed also to the tears that welled up at emotional parts, tears usually