With this assurance Morris was fain to be satisfied and go his way.
Bancroft had listened to the colloquy with new feelings. Prepared to regard with admiration all that the Elder said or did, it was not difficult for him now to catch the deeper meaning of the uncouth words. He was drawn to the Elder by moral sympathy, and his early training tended to strengthen this attraction. It was right, he felt, that the Elder should take his own course, fearing nothing that man could do.
In the evening he met Loo. She supposed with a careless air that he was goin' to pack them leather trunks of his.
“No, I've reconsidered it,” he answered. “I'm going to beg your father's pardon, and take back all I said to him.”
“Oh! then you do care for me, George,” cried the girl enthusiastically, “an' we ken be happy again. I've been real miserable since last night; I cried myself to sleep, so I did. Now I know you love me I'll do anythin' you wish, anythin'. I'll learn to play the pianner; you see if I don't.”
“Perhaps,” he replied harshly, the old anger growing bitter in him at the mention of the “pianner”—“perhaps it would be better if you gave up the idea of the piano; that costs too much,” he added significantly, “far too much. If you'd read good books and try to live in the thought of the time, it would be better. Wisdom is to be won cheaply and by all, but success in an art depends upon innate qualities.”
“I see,” she exclaimed, flaming up, “you think I can't learn to play like your sister, and I'm very ignorant, and had better read and get to know all other people have said, and you call that wisdom. I don't. Memory ain't sense, I guess; and to talk like you ain't everythin'.”
The attack pricked his vanity. He controlled himself, however, and took up the argument: “Memory is not sense, perhaps; but still one ought to know the best that has been said and done in the world. It is easier to climb the ladder when others have shown us the rungs. And surely to talk correctly is better than to talk incorrectly.”
“It don't matter much, I reckon, so long as one gets your meanin', and as for the ladder, a monkey could do that.”
The irrelevant retort puzzled him, and her tone increased his annoyance. But why, he asked himself, should he trouble to lift her to a higher level of thought? He relapsed into silence.