“They all help. Every obedient thing helps. You must grow up to your book and your picture; living a sweet, joyous, truthful, obedient life is growing up to it. The best books and the best pictures are the expression of the truest and sweetest life; the strongest and wisest life; am I talking over your head, dear?”
“No,” laughed Judith, “down into my heart.”
“My little girl has been her mother’s companion all these years; I fear I sometimes forget that you are only a little girl. But if you have grown old, you will grow young. I wish I could find a girl friend for you. But God knows all the girls in the world, and he will find one for you. If my daughter remembers all her life but one truth her mother ever said to her, I hope it may be this: The true life is the life hid with Christ; no other life is life, it is playing at life; this life is safe, still, hidden away, growing stronger every day; the expression of it, the making it speak he will take care of every hour of the day. You cannot understand this now—my words tell you so little, but they will come back to you.”
“I will write it down,” promised Judith, who loved to write things down, “and date it February fifteenth. Told in the Firelight. I know what it means better than I can say it. I often know what things mean, but I cannot say it.”
“Any more pictures?” suggested her mother, in a voice as bright as Judith’s own.
“An old face with pink cheeks and a long gray curl behind each ear, the softest step and the kindest voice—but I always forget and put sounds in my pictures. Those sounds are always in my picture of Aunt Affy.”
“You have not made a picture of Aunt Rody.”
“I don’t like to tell a picture of Aunt Rody. She is so old, so old—and she isn’t happy—and I don’t believe she’s good. If it were not for Aunt Rody I should think all old people were good; that all you had to do to be good was to grow up and grow old.”
“She is not happy. Once, years and years ago, so long ago that almost everybody has forgotten, she had a bitter disappointment.”
“What was it about, mother?” asked the girl, who always wove a love-story into the stories she planned as she stepped about the kitchen, or darned and mended the household wear.