“The point of the whole business is,” Peter continued, “that we’ve got a human soul on our hands. We imported a kind of scientific plaything to exercise our spiritual muscle on, and we’ve got a real specimen of womanhood in embryo. I don’t know whether the situation appalls you as much as it does me—” He broke off as he heard the bell ring.
“That’s David, he said he was coming.”
Then as David appeared laden with the lost carpetbag and a huge box of chocolates, he waved him to a chair, and took up his speech again. “I don’t know whether the situation appalls you, as much as it does me—if I don’t get this off my chest now, David, I can’t do it at all—but the thought of that poor little waif in there and the struggle she’s had, and the shy valiant spirit of her,—the sand that she’s got, the sand that put her through and kept her mouth shut through experiences that might easily have killed her, why I feel as if I’d give anything I had in the world to make 45 it up to her, and yet I’m not altogether sure that I could—that we could—that it’s any of our business to try it.”
“There’s nobody else who will, if we don’t,” David said.
“That’s it,” Peter said, “I’ve never known any one of our bunch to quit anything that they once started in on, but just by way of formality there is one thing we ought to do about this proposition before we slide into it any further, and that is to agree that we want to go on with it, that we know what we’re in for, and that we’re game.”
“We decided all that before we sent for the kid,” Jimmie said, “didn’t we?”
“We decided we’d adopt a child, but we didn’t decide we’d adopt this one. Taking the responsibility of this one is the question before the house just at present.”
“The idea being,” David added, “that she’s a fairly delicate piece of work, and as time advances she’s going to be delicater.”
“And that it’s an awkward matter to play with souls,” Beulah contributed; whereupon Jimmie murmured, “Browning,” sotto voice.
“She may be all that you say, Gram,” Jimmie 46 said, after a few minutes of silence, “a thunderingly refined and high-minded young waif, but you will admit that without an interpreter of the same class, she hasn’t been much good to us so far.”