“Ah, there’s plenty of poor people,” responded Jones, cheerfully, “plenty of ’em. Always is. But they won’t go to Chicago while the Fair’s on. They’ll sleep at home—that’s where they’ll sleep.”
“That’s the worst of it,” Rob said to Meg afterwards; “you see, we have to sleep somewhere. We could live on bread and milk or crackers and cheese—or oatmeal—but we have to sleep somewhere.”
“It will be warm weather,” Meg said, reflectively. “Perhaps we could sleep out of doors. Beggars do. We don’t mind.”
“I don’t think the police would let us,” Robin answered. “If they would—perhaps we might have to, some night; but we are going to that place, Meg—we are going.”
Yes, they believed they were going, and lived on the belief. This being decided, howsoever difficult to attain, it was like them both that they should dwell upon the dream, and revel in it in a way peculiarly their own. It was Meg whose imagination was the stronger, and it is true that it was always she who made pictures in words and told stories. But Robin was always as ready to enter into the spirit of her imaginings as she was to talk about them. There was a word he had once heard his father use which had caught his fancy, in fact, it had attracted them both, and they applied it to this favorite pleasure of theirs of romancing with everyday things. The word was “philander.”
“Now we have finished adding up and making plans,” he would say, putting his ten-cent account-book into his pocket, “let us philander about it.”
And then Meg would begin to talk about the City Beautiful—a City Beautiful which was a wonderful and curious mixture of the enchanted one the whole world was pouring its treasures into, one hundred miles away, and that City Beautiful of her own which she had founded upon the one towards which Christian had toiled through the Slough of Despond and up the Hill of Difficulty and past Doubting Castle. Somehow one could scarcely tell where one ended and the others began, they were so much alike, these three cities—Christian’s, Meg’s, and the fair, ephemeral one the ending of the nineteenth century had built upon the blue lake’s side.
“They must look alike,” said Meg. “I am sure they must. See what it says in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ ‘Now just as the gates were opened to let in the men, I looked in after them, and behold, the City shone like the sun’—and then it says, ‘The talk they had with the Shining Ones was about the glory of the place; who told them that the beauty and glory of it were inexpressible.’ I always think of it, Robin, when I read about those places like white palaces and temples and towers that are being built. I am so glad they are white. Think how the City will ‘shine like the sun’ when it stands under the blue sky and by the blue water, on a sunshiny day.”
They had never read the dear old worn “Pilgrim’s Progress” as they did in those days. They kept it in the straw near the Treasure, and always had it at hand to refer to. In it they seemed to find parallels for everything.
“Aunt Matilda’s world is the City of Destruction,” they would say. “And our loneliness and poorness are like Christian’s ‘burden.’ We have to carry it like a heavy weight, and it holds us back.”