"It is enough to keep up that big Caldwell place with two women and a man servant, and to live tastefully and other-fully; I call that rich, Prudence. What would you have?" said Rob.
Prue arose, tall and graceful in her eighteenth year, as a young goddess, and walked to the window where she stood looking out, her hands clasped at the back of her head with its crown of golden hair. The sunshine lit her up into a splendour that had nothing to fear from its most illuminating ray, and Wythie's busy hands paused, with her needle held at the full length of its thread, to look at her anew with an overwhelming sense of her fitness for a brilliant setting.
"I would have," said Prue slowly, without turning around, "I would have an income that was equal to these boys' principal. I would have great spacious rooms, filled with the most charming, exquisitely costumed people. I would have a retinue of well-trained servants that would keep me from feeling one jar of the wheels of living. I would have a life full of big interests, not a little, limited life like ours here. I would have the world, my sisters." And Prue extended her arms with a regal gesture that seemed at once to hunger for it and to seize it.
"Oh, Prue, Prudy!" expostulated Wythie in genuine distress. "After all our happy years in this dear little house! After all our blessed mother has taught us of the beauty of simplicity and unworldliness!"
Prue turned then to look at her elder with a tolerant smile. "Don't be so shocked, my dear, little, contented Mouse," she said. "You look as though I had announced my desire for something criminal. I don't want the world that we renounce in baptism; I don't want it in a sordid, vulgar, mean way. I want a big stage and on it I'd like to play a big part, and I'd like to use the power it gave me for glorious things. There are more ways of being good than humdrum ones."
"You are ambitious, Prudence, and Mardy says that ambitious women are not likely to be happy ones," insisted Wythie.
"Then I must be unhappy. I can't make myself like you, Wythie, satisfied to live, like Kiku-san, purring by the fire, nor like Rob, throwing herself into whatever lies at hand, and spending herself for a tiny circle," said Prue. "I'm going out into the world and it shall not be the worse for having me. I'm going to be part of a great scene, and I don't mean to be a blot on it."
Rob had let her napkin fall and was watching Prue as closely as Wythie was, sharing her presentiment of misfortune for their beautiful youngest, but seeing farther.
"Don't look so troubled, Wythiekins," she said. "Prue must dree her wierd, like the rest of humanity. She never was the wren we were; she wants to be an eagle and soar against the sun. I can understand her better than you do. I have my restless moments, but I think there is an instinct in me that is prescient; I know without having tasted, that the fruit of ambition does not nourish. Prudy will flash out into her bigger world, and she will learn that nothing matters, nothing counts but love and the inner things. I'm not two years older than you, my little tall sister, but I'm right, as you will see. It isn't only that Mardy thinks this; I feel it, or nobody knows what mad things I might do, for I'm fearfully impatient at times. It won't harm her, Wythie; the only difference is that what you and I know Prue must be taught by experience and disappointment."
"You talk like all the prophets melted into one," said Prue, impressed in spite of herself, for Rob's flashing dark eyes saw far, as her family well knew.