“I don’t know what I shall paint,” Jean answered, with a little quick sigh. “She rather frightened me, I mean the Contessa. She thinks only real geniuses should paint.”
“Nonsense. Paint all you like. You’re seventeen, aren’t you, Jean?”
Jean nodded. “Eighteen in April.”
“You seem younger than that. If I could, I’d swamp you in paint and study for the next two years. By that time you would have either found out that you were tired to death of it, and wanted real life, or you would be doing something worth while in the art line. But in any event you would have no regrets. I mean you could trot along life’s highway contentedly, without feeling there was something you had missed. It was odd your meeting the Contessa as you did. She likes you very much. I wish it could be arranged for you to go over to Italy in a year, and be under her wing. It’s such a broadening experience for you, Jeanie. Perhaps I’ll be going myself by then and could take you. You would love it as I did, I know. There’s a charm and restfulness about old world spots that all the war clamour and devastation cannot kill. Now run along to bed. Tomorrow will be a quiet day. The Contessa likes it here because she can relax and as she says ‘invite her soul to peace.’ Good night, dear.”
When Jean reached her own room, she found a surprise. On the desk lay a letter from home that Minory had laid there. Minory was Cousin Beth’s standby, as she said. She was middle-aged, and had been “help” to the Peabodys ever since she was a girl. Matrimony had never attracted Minory. She had never been known to have a sweetheart. She was tall and spare, with a broad serene face, and sandy-red hair worn parted in the middle and combed smoothly back over her ears in old-fashioned style. Her eyes were as placid and contented as a cat’s, and rather greenish, too, in tint.
“Minory has reached Nirvana,” Cousin Beth would say, laughingly. “She always has a little smile on her lips, and says nothing. I’ve never seen her angry or discontented. She’s saved her earnings and bought property, and supports several indigent relatives who have no earthly right to her help. Her favorite flower, she says, is live forever, as we call it here in New England, or the Swiss edelweiss. She’s a faithful Unitarian, and her favorite charity is orphan asylums. All my life I have looked up to Minory and loved her. There’s a poem called ‘The Washer of the Ford,’ I think it is, and she has made me think of it often, for over and over at the passing out of dear ones in the family, it has been Minory’s hand on my shoulder that has steadied me, and her hand that has closed their eyes. She stands and holds the candle for the rest of us.”
It was just like her, Jean thought, to lay the home letter where it would catch her eye and make her happy before she went to sleep. One joy of a letter from home was that it turned out to be a budget as soon as you got it out of the envelope. The one on top was from the Motherbird, written just before the mail wagon came up the hill.
DEAR PRINCESS ROYAL:
You have been much on my mind, but I haven’t time for a long letter, as Mr. Ricketts may bob up over the hill any minute, and he is like time and tide that wait for no man, you know. I am ever so glad your visit has proved a happy one. Stay as long as Cousin Beth wants you. Father is really quite himself these days, and I have kept Mrs. Gorham, so the work has been very easy for me, even without my first lieutenant.
It looks like an early spring, and we expect Ralph and Honey from the west in about a week, instead of in May. Ralph will probably be our guest for awhile, as Father will enjoy his company. The crocuses are up all along the garden wall, and the daffodils and narcissus have started to send up little green lances through the earth. I have never enjoyed the coming of a spring so much as now. Perhaps one needs a long bleak winter in order to appreciate spring.