The tangle of her affairs complicated all her thought, and sent a chill wave over her. The cold, hard, insuperable fact of her debts! She owed the merchants in Solano, the small merchants of her village, and still, after the lapse of many months, she owed Mrs. Morris a huge obligation. Finally, and very nearly the worst of all, there was the desperate debt in which Purcell was involved. A pauper and a gambler with life! How else could a person who had managed to put herself in everybody’s debt be called? Clearly she had demonstrated that she could not handle her own life, to say nothing of playing a part in that complex organization to which she had had the assumption to aspire.
A great agitation came over her when in that one solemn final moment she looked into her soul and bade good-by to all she had come to do. Slowly she began to efface and obliterate the old orders of life, and the transcendent consecration of the past. The East to which she had come with a torch became a mere drear fact of over-powering millions. Ages, and the tried souls of many men would be offered up before the East found its freedom. What she did or did not do could not weigh in the infinite balance.
Slowly she turned back to the room. The brown gnomes were sweating terribly in the throes of composition, mining the realms of thought for a few throttled ideas. Never anywhere were they so dearly born. Julie stopped still to stare at them. “Poor little generation of light!” she murmured.
Delphine glanced up at her with his quick brown eyes. He was the barometer of the class—a youthful personality that had escaped the general languor of the race. He watched the other boys, and interpreted their needs. He seldom sat in his seat, but was, with his books under his arm, almost always in a state of itinerant education. He had been a devotee of the betel-nut, but at Julie’s solicitation had given it up.
The children marched out at the end of the morning session. Julie thrust her note in her pocket, and was following after them when Delphine, trailing by a string a big bright red tropical beetle, stopped her.
“You stay here always, Maestra? You never go away?” he urged earnestly.
Julie glanced at him absently. “Go home, Delphine,” she said gently.
“Here,” said the boy, “is a present for you of this beautiful bug—if you will not go.”
“No, thank you, Delphine. I know it would break your heart to give up Balthazar, though he bites nasty welts all over you all the time.”
But Delphine stuck along after her.