“You had better speak—No; I will see Chauncey in the morning.” Mrs. Bogardus never, if she could avoid it, gave an order through a third person.
“Well, I thought I'd just step in. Chauncey said 't was no use disturbing you to-night, but he's just that way—so easy about everything! I thought you wouldn't want to be harboring tramps this wet weather when most anybody would be tempted to build a fire. I'm more concerned about what goes on down there now we're out of the house! I seem to have it on my mind the whole time. A house is just like a child: the more you don't see it the more you worry about it.”
“I'm glad you have such a home feeling about the place,” said Mrs. Bogardus, avoiding the onset of words. “Well, good-evening, Cerissa. Thank you for your trouble. I will see about it in the morning.”
Mrs. Bogardus mentioned what she had just heard to Miss Sallie, who remarked, with her keen sense of antithesis, what a contrast that fireside must be to this.
“Which fireside?”
“Oh, your lodger upon the cold ground,—making his little bit of a stolen blaze in that cavern of a chimney in the midst of the wet trees! What a nice thing to have an unwatched place like that where a poor bird of passage can creep in and make his nest, and not trouble any one. Think what Jean Valjeans one might shelter”—
“Who?”
“What 'angels unawares.'”
“It will be unawares, my dear,—very much unawares,—when I shelter any angels of that sort.”
“Oh, you wouldn't turn him out, such weather as this?”