"Oh, Mrs. Campbell, don't stop. Go on, please."
"My dear girls, my lungs are not made of cast iron," said Mrs. Campbell, smiling, "and I think you have had a pretty long 'screed,' as my father would say. Do you know that I have been talking to you for more than two hours?"
"It doesn't seem possible," said Laura Bryant, who had heretofore taken very little interest in the missionary society. "It does not seem any time at all."
"That is a very pretty compliment, my dear."
"It wasn't a compliment, it was true," answered Laura, bluntly.
"Compliments may be true as well as false, Laura. If I should say you were a very attentive listener, that would be a compliment, but it would also be true."
Laura hardly knew whether to be pleased or not. She was not accustomed to politeness, or even civility, at home. All the Bryants thought they showed their sincerity by being blunt and rude and saying the most disagreeable things possible, especially to each other. Nevertheless, she felt, as everybody must, the charm of sincere good breeding.
"What I like is that you make everything so real," said she. "When I read of such things in books, they never do seem real. I cannot make myself believe that these Turks and Syrians and Arabs are people having the same feelings as we have."
"I know," observed Lizzy. "I have had the same feelings about places I have never seen. I am not quite sure that I really believe in China, after all."
"You are like the old lady who said it had never been revealed to her that there was such a place as Jerusalem," said Mrs. Campbell. "I believe many people have the same feeling. It is one of the difficulties which the mission boards have to contend with. There are numbers who would be ready to give if they could only see the need with their own eyes, but they cannot do that, and it has never been 'revealed' to them that there are any such places or people or things as the missionary papers tell them of. That power of realization is one of the many uses of imagination."