“It must be heavenly to travel in the country of Scott and Dickens!” she said, quaintly naïve. “How you must have enjoyed it!”
“I did, exceedingly, but less on account of ‘David Copperfield’ and ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ than because, as a boy, I reveled in English history, and that my mother’s father, for whom I was named, was English. You should hear my sister talk of her first journey across England. She would say every little while in an awed undertone: ‘This is just living Dickens!’ You have not met her yet, I think?” to Hetty.
“No.”
The tone was reserved, without being rude. He could have fancied that sadness underlay civil regret. Perhaps May had been mistaken in postponing her call until the parsonage was in perfect order.
“She means to call very soon. She thought it would be unneighborly to intrude before you had recovered from the fatigue of removal and travel. Mr. Wayt was my father’s guest for a day or two, you know, before your arrival, and I have since had the pleasure of meeting him several times and of hearing him preach this morning.”
In the pause that succeeded the speech the church bell began to ring for afternoon service. Under the impression that he had lost caste in not attending upon the second stated ordinance of the sanctuary he offered a lame explanation.
“I am afraid I am not an exemplary church-goer. But I find one sermon as much as I can digest and practice from Sunday to Sunday. My mother doesn’t like to hear me say it. She thinks such sentiments revolutionary and uncanonical, and no doubt she is right.”
“Anybody is excusable for preferring to worship ‘under green apple boughs’ to-day,” observed Hester, with uncharacteristic tact. “You see we have always lived in cities, great and small. We have been used to brick walls and narrow, high houses, with paved backyards, with cats on the fences”—disgustfully—“and wet clothes flapping in your eyes if you tried to pretend to ruralize. Everybody hasn’t as much imagination as Young John Chivery, who said the flapping of sheets and towels in his face ‘made him feel like he was in groves.’”
“Fairhill has preserved the rural element remarkably well, when one considers her tens of thousands of inhabitants, her water supply and electric lights,” said March; “and luckily one doesn’t need much imagination to help out his enjoyment of the world on this Sunday afternoon.”
His tone was so respectfully familiar, his bearing so easy, the girls forgot that he was a stranger.