“I’ve been asleep,” thought Barbara, bitterly, “asleep and dreaming.”
“Then Medea clapped her hands together, and cried, ‘Sing louder, Orpheus; sing a bolder strain; wake up these hapless sluggards, or none of them will see the land of Hellas more.’
“Then Orpheus lifted his harp, and crashed his cunning hand across the strings, and his music and his voice rang like a trumpet through the still evening air: into the air it rushed like thunder, till the rocks rang, and the sea, and into their souls it rushed like wine, till all hearts beat fast within their breasts.”
“Every dream I had at college—every hope, every aspiration—has gone,” interrupted Barbara’s thoughts. “Surely I left school with plenty of ambition. But here I am, a drudge of a housekeeper, and a poor one at that! I can’t even cook a meal or iron a waist. And I haven’t the chance to do anything else, with mother sick. Oh, I would like to! I would, I would! Because this is my last opportunity. If I don’t take this, I shall never, never, see the land of Hellas more.”
David lost his place in the story. But the new page he turned was just as sweet to him, and he went on reading in his child’s voice, made hoarse by hay fever, and yet sweet with love of the words:—
“And a dream came to Æetes, and filled his heart with fear. He thought he saw a shining star which fell into his daughter’s lap; and that Medea his daughter took it gladly, and carried it to the river-side and cast it in, and there the whirling river bore it down, and out into the Euxine Sea.”
It was nine o’clock that evening before the last dish was washed, David’s throat-wash prepared, Gassy’s head anointed, and a letter written. After these things were done, Barbara went out to the mail-box. She posted her letter, and came back through the moonlight that seemed to heat the breathless night. Mosquitoes hummed about the porch, a cricket creaked in the grass, and the voices of innumerable locusts nicked the silence of the evening. The house was dark and lonely, and still. Barbara sank down on the porch, wearily, and laid her head against the railing.
“I’ve cast in my star,” she said to herself.
The homely words of the Vegetable Man came back to her with new meaning.
“Yes, it’s true, I am without,” she added; “that’s just the word for it!”