"We're running off to the circus!"
"And what can you possibly be going to do at the circus? Children go to a circus—who ever heard of such a thing! I should think you'd have stayed at home and studied arithmetic or memorized the capitals of all the States."
"Well, as for me," cried Elsie, "I'm pleased to explain what I shall do: I shall drink lemonade and sit with the fat woman if there's room for both of us on the same plank!"
"And what are you going to do?"
"I'm going to do everything, of course! That's my ticket: I don't pay for all and see some! I'm going to do everything."
"Everything is a good deal," commented the doctor introspectively. "Everything is a good deal; but do what you can toward it—as you have paid the price."
For a while he mused how childhood wants all of whatever it craves: its desire is as single as its eye. Only later in life we come to know—or had better know—that we may have the whole of very little: that a small part of anything is our wisest portion, and the instant anything becomes entirely ours, it becomes lost to us or we become lost to it: the bright worlds that last for ages revolve—they do not collide.
He was still thinking of this when he met the carriage of Professor Ousley; and the two middle-aged friends, who in their lives had never passed each other on the road without stopping, stopped now. Professor Ousley got out and came across to the doctor's buggy and greeted him with fresh concerned cordiality.
"It has come at last," he announced, as though something long talked of between them could be thus referred to; and he drew out a letter which he handed in to be read; it was a call to a professorship in a Northern university. As the doctor read it and reread it (continuing to read because he did not know what to say)—as he thus read, he began to look like a man grown ill.
"You have accepted, of course," he said barely.