“Why don’t you?” asked Mrs. Willowby.
“Just now, I haven’t time,” said Barbara; “but if I had all the time in the world, there wouldn’t be any one to talk to.”
“Why not your father and mother?”
“Father and mother! Why, father doesn’t know poetry,—except Riley and Bret Harte; and mother doesn’t care for it.”
Mrs. Willowby’s sweet brown eyes twinkled. “You’re joking with me, Barbara.”
“No, I’m in earnest.”
“You dear little girl! Are you such a stranger to your own home people? I don’t believe that Matthew Arnold ever wrote anything that your mother doesn’t know. Where she gets time, with all her multitudinous duties, to love Shelley, and live Browning, and keep abreast of Stephen Phillips and Yeats, I don’t see; but she does it, somehow. She is one of the few true poetry-lovers I know. As for your father, I have heard him quote Riley and Harte to you children, because, I always supposed, he thought you could understand them. But he himself doesn’t stop there. He isn’t so widely read as your mother, but the old poets he has made his own. He knows his yellow Shakespeare from cover to cover. How have you ever lived in the same house with them and yet been such a stranger? Your father and mother, dear, are the cultivated people of Auburn.”
Surprise was written strongly on every feature of Barbara’s face.
“That’s the trouble with college life. You young people never get the opportunity to know your own families, nowadays. At the time when you are just beginning to be old enough to appreciate your parents, you are sent away. Then you go to work, or marry, and leave home without knowing the real wealth that often lies at your own doors. Did you ever read Emerson’s ‘Days’?”