Her mother looked up with her bright, still eyes.
“I trust the truth. I know that, however far you go, you’ll come back some day.”
“I believe you see all of them—Darwin and Huxley and Herbert Spencer—coming back,” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
His eyes smiled, loving her. But you could see it amused him, too, to think of them, all those reckless, courageous thinkers, coming back, to share her secret. His thinking was just a dangerous game he played.
She looked at her father with a kind of awe as he sat there, reading his book, in danger and yet safe.
She wanted to know what that fascination was. She took down Herbert Spencer and tried to read him. She made a point of finishing every book she had begun, for her pride couldn’t bear being beaten. Her head grew hot and heavy: she read the same sentences over and over again; they had no meaning; she couldn’t understand a single word of Herbert Spencer. He had beaten her. As she put the book back in its place she said to herself: “I mustn’t. If I go on, if I get to the interesting part I may lose my faith.” And soon she made herself believe that this was really the reason why she had given it up.
Besides Connie Hancock there were Lizzie Pierce and Sarah Barmby.
Exquisite pleasure to walk with Lizzie Pierce. Lizzie’s walk was a sliding, swooping dance of little pointed feet, always as if she were going out to meet somebody, her sharp, black-eyed face darting and turning.
“My dear, he kept on doing this” (Lizzie did it) “as if he was trying to sit on himself to keep him from flying off into space like a cork. Fancy proposing on three tumblers of soda water! I might have been Mrs. Pennefather but for that.”