“Ay! Think ye that? And what new light ha’e ye gotten about her to-day?” said her father, arrested by her look rather than her words.
“No new light. Only I have been thinking about her last night and to-day. She is the best woman I know, and the happiest; and I envy her.”
“Ye have but to follow in her steps, and ye’ll be as good as she is,—in time,” said her father dryly. “As to her happiness—I should say she perhaps makes the most of the means of happiness given to her, but otherwise I see little cause that you have to envy her. She is reasonable, and doesna let her wishes and her fancies get the better of her good sense, and so she is content.”
“And if I were reasonable, would I be content, I wonder? As to being as good—that must come of higher teaching and peculiar discipline, and I doubt I shall never be good in her way.”
“And what for no? Your aunt would be the first to tell you that you can get the higher teaching for the asking. And as for discipline—the chances are ye’ll get your share as well as the rest of us.”
“But not just in the same way. A long, patient, laborious, self-forgetting life hers has been—has it not? She is strong and she has been successful; yet she is not hard. She is good, but she is not down on wrong-doers in the way that some good folk are. If I had my choice, I think I would choose to have just such a life as she has had—if it would make me like her.”
Mr Dawson looked at his daughter in some surprise. Jean was not looking at him, but over his head far away to the sea, bright for the moment, under a gleam of sunshine.
“Would that be your choice? A life of labour, and then the life of a solitary single woman! I think I see you!” said her father with something like indignation in his tones.
May laughed. Jean’s eyes came back from the sea with a vague, wistful look in them that startled her father.
“I think, Jean, ye hardly ken what ye’re speaking about.”