Jean felt almost guilty, as her own heart echoed the wish. How she would study, if only it could happen. Yet there came the tug of homesickness too, along the end of the second week. Perhaps it was Kit’s letter that did it, telling how the house was at sixes and sevens without her, and Mother had to be in fifty places at once.
Jean had to laugh over that part though, for Kit was noted for her ability to attend to exactly one thing at a time.
“Now, Shad, I can’t attend to more than one thing at a time, you know.”
“Can’t you?” Shad had responded, meditatively. “Miss Roxy can tend to sixty-nine and a half things at the same time with her eyes shut and one hand tied.”
Then suddenly, out of the blue sky came the bolt. It was a telegram signed “Mother.”
“Come at once. Am leaving for California.”
Jean never stopped to think twice. It was the call to duty, and she caught the noon train back to Gilead Center.
CHAPTER VIII
SEEKING HER GOAL
All the way up on the train Jean kept thinking about Daddy Higginson’s last words when he had held her hand at parting.
“This isn’t my thought, Jeanie, but it’s a good one even if Nietzsche did write it. As I used to tell you in class about Pope and Socrates and all the other warped geniuses, think of a man’s physical suffering before you condemn what he has written. Carlyle might have been our best optimist if he’d only discovered pepsin tablets, and lost his dyspepsia. Here it is, and I want you to remember it, for it goes with arrows of longing. The formula for happiness: ‘A yea, a nay, a straight line, a goal.’ ”