“What you say must be true, because you understand and I do not. Still—I wish I could be once on a lighted ship at night, and go to one of the countries at the end of the sea. I have never been, and you have....”
At first the painter did not answer, his eyes on the bronzed figure beside him. But then he smiled, curiously.
“Look!” he said. “We are all covered with the sand of the sea. We must brush it off and go back into the world.”
RETARDED BOMBS
I
“For the land’s sake! If there isn’t Jonas Lane!” burst out Miss Cockerill irrelevantly.
She so far forgot the respect due to a minister’s wife, and that reserve which should be the portion of a maiden lady, as to forsake her chair for the window. Peering discreetly through her lattice of geraniums, she regarded with tense interest the actions of a gentleman who was emerging from a buggy in front of her neighbour’s house. This person, after securing his horse to a ringed post, made his way with some deliberation toward the door.
“He’s taken on flesh,” pursued Miss Cockerill. She drew a trifle to one side in order to share her opportunity with her visitor, but losing nothing of what it was vouchsafed her to behold during the interval between the pull at the bell and the opening of the door. “She keeps him waitin’, same as she’s done for twenty years,” commented the spectator.
The door at which he sued closed behind the expectant gentleman who had “taken on flesh.” And as Miss Cockerill’s most piercing gaze failed to penetrate that exasperating barrier, she turned apologetically:
“You see, Mis’ Webster, I’ve known Martha Waring ever since we were that high.” She indicated an altitude above the floor about equal to that of an ambitious kitten. “She was born in that very house, and I was born in this, and now we’re the only ones left of our folks. So it seems like I knew more about her than I did about myself.”