“Oh, if it could be true! But it is too grand, too wonderful!”
“You won’t be ashamed of poor ‘Hoppity-pat,’ then, will you?” asked Octave, a bit wistfully.
“It is nonsense. It will prove to be good for nothing.”
“Come, you doubter. It’s about as hard to pull you up the hill of faith as—I don’t know what! Didn’t our last experiment work ‘as slick as grease?’ à la Abry-ham. Do you suppose I’d have handled all those frogs and hop-toads, and nasty, slimy other things, if after the first time I hadn’t had supreme faith in the—unnameable?”
Melville began to catch her enthusiasm. “Octave, if—if—it should be true, wouldn’t it be glorious?”
“Wouldn’t it? The best of it is that I feel it is. ‘It’s borne in on me,’ as Rosetta said when she forgot to put any sugar in the jam, and it wouldn’t jam. Say, Melville, let’s just hurrah!”
“I can’t hurrah, yet. But, Octave, you’re smart! It doesn’t seem as if you could be a girl, you think of things so.”
“So grandma said, when I rode the kicking horse, bareback, and forgot to mend my stockings. Which wasn’t ‘thinking of things so,’ it seems to me. But, remember, if I am so bright, I shall expect my reward—”
“‘To the half of my kingdom!’” interrupted Melville.
“Humph! Worse than that: you are not to tell a single soul, till the whole thing is settled. I’d like to be of some importance, for once in my life.”