“Indeed it is,” said Dr. Helen. “And it is a gift more widely distributed than everybody knows. If you can, do help Catherine to discover that it is one of hers!”
“She helped me find out that I liked to sew,” said Hannah. “I hated the sight of a needle before I went to Germany. But I didn’t know you hated sewing, Catherine.”
“I don’t,” Catherine answered tranquilly. “But there are always so many other things to do, and there is so much to read. It makes me shiver to think that I have only three years more at Dexter, and I haven’t begun to read all I want to. I’d like to move over to the library and stay there.”
“That’s a serious criticism of your college life, Catherine,” said Dr. Helen.
Hannah giggled. “I suppose there is a library at Dexter, but I was there a whole term, and never went inside it once!”
Everybody laughed. “Well,” said Dr. Helen, “that was the other extreme. But I suppose if you young people were all-wise and learned, there’d 261 be no point in sending you to college at all. And the world would be much more monotonous if it were filled with grown-ups! What a conflagration those red candles will make, Frieda!”
Catherine had left her seat and gone across the room to the poetry section of the bookcase, and was now turning the pages of a small green book.
“Listen to this Singing Leaf, Mother!
“‘The wisest finding that I have
Is very young, no doubt,
Yet many a man must needs grow old
Before he finds it out.
“‘How happily it comes about–
And I was never told!–
That we must all be young awhile
Before we can be old!’”
Dr. Helen laughed. “That is certainly very appropriate, and a good close to our rather sermonizing talk. I suppose fifty-year-old birthday parties should lead one to serious thinking! But now show me how far your nonsense rhyming has progressed. It’s nearly supper time.”