“No, Belle; you don’t understand my mother. I only wish you could meet her. My trouble has nothing to do with my studies. I have a care that I cannot confide to anyone.”
“Pray, don’t; at least never confide in me. It is the last thing I wish to be—the recipient of another person’s secrets. I either forget what I am told, or I blurt it out to the next person I come across. You had better let your worry go; that’s my advice.”
“Let it go? I wish I could.”
“You can if you will do what I ask. Absorb yourself in work; cease to fret about mere externals. What do they matter? Heat, cold, worry, pain even, nothing matters if one can but grasp the riches of the past.”
“But what about the riches of the future, Belle? You are so fond of looking back: do you never look forward?”
“Forward,” said Belle; “yes, I sometimes do. I look forward to the time when frivols will be exterminated
forever, when the drones in the ordinary course of things must die out. Leslie, dear, would you feel inclined to hear me recite some verses of my own this morning? I have been in the poetic mood for the last few days, and last night the poet’s frenzy really seized me. My lines begin with ‘Delve, delve, deeply delve.’”
“I don’t think I quite follow,” said Leslie.
“Quite follow! but it is so simple. The metaphor refers to a miner, the gold is beneath. He delves, he obtains, his joy is unutterable.”
“But I am not in the humor for poetry to-day. The fact is, I am not in the humor to be anything but disobliging.”