“If somebody comes—if our Father in Heaven sends somebody as good and gentle and wise as your own father, I shall be glad of it up in Heaven, I think. You do not remember your father; in his picture he is like Don—Don is your father’s brother’s son; your fathers were much alike. Your father was only a clerk, his salary was never large; Don’s father was a business man, he died rich and left his only son a fortune; but your father and I never longed for money—Don has always given me money as his father did; he said you and I had a right to it. It has never been hard to take money from Don—he will be always kind to you; he thinks he has a right to you; you are the only children of the two brothers; they were only two—they never had a sister. Now you know all about your ancestry on both sides, I think; your grandfather and grandmother Mackenzie were born in Scotland; they died before you were born. Aunt Affy will be always telling you about the ‘Sparrow girls.’ My mother was a Sparrow girl. Just a year ago we were in that dear old home.”
“I was twelve then—I had my birthday there; perhaps I shall have another birthday there in April. Aunt Affy wants us to come so much. I can take better care of you now because I am older and I must not have lessons to make you tired; we will have a long vacation; I will only write poems for you and you needn’t even take the trouble to make the measure right. Aunt Rody said I was a silly baby to be always hanging about you; but she will see how I have grown up. Don says I am a little woman. Now I’ll tell you a picture. Shut your eyes, again.”
The tear-blinded eyes were shut again; Judith had been looking into the fire as she talked; she was afraid to look up into her mother’s eyes. It was being brave to look into the fire.
“I see a room up-stairs, a room with a slanting roof and only one window; the window looks down into the garden; it has a green paper shade tied up with a cord; there is a strip of rag-carpet before the bed, that is all the carpet there is; and there’s a funny old wash-stand with a blue bowl sunk down into a hole on the top, and a towel on the rail of the wash-stand with a red border—in winter a pipe comes up in the stove-pipe hole from the big stove in the sitting-room, but there’s ice in the pitcher very often; there’s a bureau with a cracked looking-glass on the top, an old bureau, everything is old but the little girl kneeling on the rag-carpet rug beside the bed, with her head on the red and white quilt, saying her prayers. That little girl is you, mother, a sweet, obedient little girl, that hasn’t a will of her own, and tempers, and tantrums like me.”
“I like to think that sweet little girl is you.”
“Then it is me; I’ve grown sweet in a hurry,” Judith laughed, “and left all my tempers and tantrums far behind.”
“There’s another T to go with them—temptations—through which you grow strong.”
Not seeming to heed, but in reality holding her mother’s thought in her heart Judith ran merrily on: “And I see a church, with a little green in front, and posts to hitch the horses, the two church doors are wide open, for in the picture it is Sunday morning; Aunt Rody is in the head of a pew in the body of the church, and Aunt Affy sits next, and Uncle Cephas is next the door, and there’s a girl between Aunt Affy and Uncle Cephas, a girl fifteen years old and her hair is braided, not in long, babyish curls—”
“Oh, my little girl, wear your curls as long as you can, because mother loves them,” her mother urged, bending forward to touch the soft, bright hair.
“Then her hair is curled, and she is trying to be good and listen. Perhaps she likes sermons—she looks so; in the picture the sermon is like the Bible stories you tell me when we read together—I wish ministers told Bible stories. And there’s the sweetest singing; it is like Marion Kenney’s singing; she sings like a bird, Don says; there are girls and boys all over the church, for the minister in the picture knows how to tell Bible stories to boys and girls and make them as real as the people and things in Summer Avenue and Bensalem; just as naughty and just as good. Jean Draper is there—in the pew behind me. Why, mother,” bringing herself back to the present and turning to look into her mother’s face, “Jean Draper was never in the steam cars, or on a ferry-boat in all her life—she has never been in New York or any where, only to Dunellen, which they call ‘town,’ and she walks there, or rides with her father. She wants to go somewhere as much as I want to go to boarding-school. It’s the dream of her life, as boarding-school is my dream.”