“I suppose it’s my soul you’re hoping to catch. Well, I never did wear it on my sleeve,” and she laughed, a great laugh like a man’s.
“No, you do not. That’s true. But it’s my job to get at people’s souls, wherever they wear ’em, and paint them in.”
“Well, hunt, then. Souls are queer things,” opined Miss Letty, carefully drawing off her old gloves and smoothing them out with her long, bony fingers. “I sometimes think the Lord gets the souls mixed up and puts them in the wrong bodies. Maybe that’s wicked but if ’tis I think lots wickeder things.”
“Maybe He knows more about it than we think He does—” said Dugald so softly that Sidney, frankly eavesdropping, had hard work to catch the words. They were so interesting, these two, that she was glad she had not let them know she was in Top Notch; she hoped they would talk a long time about souls and such things. But without warning Miss Letty changed the subject.
“Did you ever know such a smart piece as that girl of Achsy Green’s?”
“Sidney?” And Mr. Dugald chuckled. “She’s sure one rare kid. I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed anything as much as having her around. And do you know the youngster’s rarely gifted—she has a colorful imagination and a perception of verities that may take her further than her father. She is fighting destiny just now, but it will get her; if she isn’t a poet she’ll be a creator of something equally fine.”
“I’m too old to live to know—but you will,” answered Miss Letty, quite calmly. “And maybe we’re both wrong. Maybe her finest work will be to raise a family. And I don’t know, when all’s said and done, but that’s as good a job as your daubs or my music or a book of verse. You’ve got something then that can love you back.”
But Sidney did not hear this simple philosophy for she had dropped to the floor of Top Notch and covered her ears with her hands. Her face flamed with the anger that held her. How dared they sit there and talk her over! And say that she was going to write poetry! That she had something or other and might be greater than her father! A poet! Well, she wouldn’t! She would not! She thought, with stinging humiliation, of the verses she had written in her attic den and that lay now hidden in the secret place under the floor. She’d written them just because they hummed so in her ears that she had had to write them, but when she returned home she’d tear them into tiny bits and never, never write another line, even though the words did jingle and hum.
She sat cramped on the floor of Top Notch, until she was certain the intruders had gone away. Then she got stiffly to her feet and reached for “Dorothea.” Hot tears of mortification blinded her eyes so that she had to dash them away with the back of her hand. One splashed upon the page she had opened.
“I have come, dear Dorothea, to another crossroad in life. You only shall witness my solemn vow. I shall not be a poet! I shall be a missionary. A missionary’s life is fraught with danger and takes them to distant climes and they have to dress in what is given to them out of a barrel—”