Wilfred drew the only stool in the room up beside the lantern, and Bill and Brick disposed themselves on the bench, each holding his pipe on his knee as if fearful of losing a word. Red Feather, his beady eyes fastened on the young man's face, sat gracefully erect, apparently alert to all that was going on. The lantern reddened the strong clean-cut face of the young man, and touched the upturned pages to the whiteness of snow. A sudden wind had sprung up, and the flaring blaze from the open stove-door touched to vivid distinctness the giant, the old man and the Indian. Brick closed the stove-door, and the sudden gloom brought out in mellow effect Wilfred's animated face, the dull yellow wall against which his sturdy shoulder rested, and the letter in his hand.
CHAPTER XIV
WRITING HOME
"Dear Brick and Bill:
"I don't know what to tell first. It's all so strange and grand—the people are just people, but the things are wonderful. The people want it to be so; they act, and think according to the things around them. They pride themselves on these things and on being amongst them, and I am trying to learn to do that, too. When I lived in the cove—it seems a long, long time ago—my thoughts were always away from dirt-floors and cook-stoves and cedar logs and wash-pans. But the people in the big world keep their minds tied right up to such things—only the things are finer—they are marble floors and magnificent restaurants and houses on what they call the 'best streets.' At meals, there are all kinds of little spoons and forks, and they think to use a wrong one is something dreadful; that is why I say the forks and spoons seem more important than THEY are, but they want it to be so.
"They have certain ways of doing everything, and just certain times for doing them, and if you do a wrong thing at a right time, or a right thing at a wrong time, it shows you are from the West. At first, I couldn't say a word, or turn around, without showing that I was from the West. But although I've been from home only a few days, I'm getting so that nobody can tell that I'm more important than the furniture around me. I'm trying to be just like the one I'm with, and I don't believe an outsider can tell that I have any more sense than the rest of them.
"Miss Sellimer is so nice to me. I told her right at the start that I didn't know anything about the big world, and she teaches me everything. I'd be more comfortable if she could forget about my saving her life, but she never can, and is so grateful it makes me feel that I'm enjoying all this on false pretenses for you know my finding her was only an accident. Her mother is very pleasant to me—much more so than to her. Bill, you know how you speak to your horse, sometimes, when it acts contrary? That's the way Miss Sellimer speaks to her mother, at times. However, they don't seem very well acquainted with each other. Of course if they'd lived together in a cove for years, they'd have learned to tell each other their thoughts and plans, but out in the big world there isn't time for anything except to dress and go.
"I'm learning to dress. I used to think a girl could do that to please herself, but no, the dresses are a thousand times more important than the people inside them. It wouldn't matter how wise you are if your dress is wrong, nor would it matter how foolish, if your dress is like everybody else's. A person could be independent and do as she pleased, but she wouldn't be in society. And nobody would believe she was independent, they would just think she didn't know any better, or was poor. Because, they don't know anything about being independent; they want to be governed by their things. A poor person isn't cut off from society because he hasn't money, but because he doesn't know how to deal with high things, not having practised amongst them. It isn't because society people have lots of money that they stick together, but because all of them know what to do with the little forks and spoons.
"It is like the dearest, jolliest kind of game to me, to be with these people, and say just what they say, and like what they like, and act as they act—and that's the difference between me and them; it's not a game to them, it's deadly earnest. They think they're LIVING!