"Oh, you'll get sick," his former sister and nurse cried, looking so troubled that Tom had to laugh.
"Don't you worry," he answered, smiling down at her, "I've had such a good bringing up that I can't go wrong now, not anyways."
Nothing that he could have said would have meant so much. She accepted his words in their fullest meaning and felt uplifted, comforted. Whatever she might make of her own life, she had helped wisely to mold his. If she never saw him again she would know that her influence would stay with him to the end, blossoming in honorable thoughts and kindly deeds.
"And so you advise me to marry?" she said, rising too and trying to speak with a laugh.
"No, ma'am!" with decision. "I ain't advising you to marry. I's just advising you not to give up marrying."
"Well," with a little shrug, "it amounts to the same thing."
"What you got to hurry for?" Tom returned to his old charge.
"If I don't decide I can't stay where I am. There is Miss Wood one evening telling me to go on with my work—she loathes Dick—and Mrs. Pickens the next telling me to accept a good husband. That's what it's like when Dick's away, and it's a million times harder when he's around. I'll move if I give him up.
"I met an old man this winter," she went on, "a friend of Kathleen's. He had a terrible philosophy, everything was going to the dogs. You'd have thought that the world would never get any better. But he said one thing to me. He told me to dance and have a good time and to be sure to keep out of the conflict. That was the way he put it, 'Keep out of the conflict.'"
"That might be good advice if you could."