CHAPTER XVIII.
About a week after, one day when their lesson was ended, Iona said: “I have seen Dylar to-day, and he proposed that I should make a visit with you. Professor Pearlstein, whose class of boys you will recollect, would have come to see you, but he is quite lame. He sprained his ankle some time ago, and cannot yet walk much. He knew Professor Mora well. They were boys together. Would you like to go up?”
Tacita assented eagerly, and they set out.
“You are going to see an admirable person,” Iona said as they went along. “He is very useful to the community. He sets the boys thinking, and guides their thoughts, but not so severely as to check their expression. He especially urges them to study what he calls the Scriptures of nature. He keeps the records of the town, and in the most perfect way, knowing how to select what is worth recording. He will make no comment. His idea is that most histories have too much of the historian in them.”
“My grandfather had the same opinion,” Tacita said. “He held that the province of an historian is to collect as many authentic facts as possible, and present them, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusions. He did not thank the historian for telling him that a man was good or was wicked from his own conclusion, giving no proof. He preferred to decide for himself from the given facts whether to admire or condemn the man.”
They reached the path leading upward; and there Iona stopped. She was very pale.
“Would you mind going up alone?” she asked. “I do not feel quite well.”
Tacita anxiously offered assistance.
Iona turned away somewhat abruptly. “I need nothing, thank you. Go in peace, since you are willing. I am sure that you would have much more pleasure in a tête-à-tête conversation with Professor Pearlstein. Present my salutations.”
Tacita, feeling herself decidedly rejected, looked after her a moment. Iona was evidently neither weak nor faint. She walked rapidly, and, instead of going homeward, had followed the outer road northward.