“Not for such a reason—to keep house for him,” replied Judith, in a flash of indignation.
“His grandfather and father were born in Scotland—on his mother’s side he has Scotch grit. He’ll pull himself through, but it’s rather tough on him. He makes me feel like a pampered baby. He worked his way through college; he has fed on thistles and he shows it. I wish I had,” said Roger devoutly.
“Is it too late?” asked Judith teasingly.
“I feel so small beside him,” Roger went on discontentedly; “he is the biggest and best fellow I know.”
“Roger, Roger, you tell me not to seek hard things for myself.”
Roger lapsed into silence. Judith wondered if she might not put her afternoon into her next story. Sometime what a pretty book she would make out of her short stories. She would call it: “A Child’s Outlook.” But that would be too grown up for children. Her stories were for children, as well as about children. Marion had planned a summer of writing for her; she had the “plots” for five stories in her head; she had told them all to Marion as she used to tell her mother pictures; they were, all of them, founded on her own childish experiences; her childhood had been full of things—Marion said her own childhood had not been so full. Every day when she was a child had been a story. Telling her mother pictures had helped make her stories. She used to tell her mother stories about herself.
“You are too young to look back to your childhood,” Roger had once told her; “that comes with age.”
“Mother made it so real—she impressed me with its happenings. She made things happen, I understand now, because she was going away so soon. She used to say, ‘I want you to look back and remember this.’ And I read aloud to her the journal she asked me to keep the last three years—I draw upon that now.”
A summer of stories. She laughed aloud in her joy. She wished she might take her book of stories to Heaven to show to her mother.