“Sarepta breathes Philip,” her mother replied.
“We are twin spirits like Blaise and Jacqueline Pascal. Do you know about them, Tessa?”
“I know that he was a monk and she a nun.”
“That is like me, and not like Philip,” said Miss Sarepta; “he shall not be a monk because I am a nun!”
“His wife will be jealous enough of you, though,” said Mrs. Towne; “not a mail comes that he does not send you something. How would she like that?”
“Philip could not love any one that would come between us. Tessa, do you admire my brother as much as I wish you to do?”
“I admire him exceedingly,” said Tessa, looking up from her twenty-fifth block of the basket quilt; “he is my ideal. I knew that I had found my ideal as soon as I saw him; I did not wait to hear him speak.”
And that he was her ideal she became more and more assured, for in February he spent a week at home and she had opportunity to study him at all hours and in any hour of the day. He had lost his fancied resemblance to Dr. Towne, or she had lost it in thinking of him as only himself. The long talks, during which she sat, at Miss Sarepta’s side, on a foot cushion, work in hand, the basket blocks, or some more fanciful work for Miss Sarepta, she remembered afterward as one of the times in her life in which she grew. She told Miss Sarepta that she and her brother were like the men and women that St. Paul in his Epistles sent his love to. “He ought to marry a saint like Madame Guyon; I think that it would be easier to revere him as a saint than to marry him. I can’t imagine any woman forgiving him, or loving him because he needs her love; he stands so far above me, I could never think of him as at my side and sometimes saying, ‘Help me, Tessa,’ or, ‘What do you think?’”
“Now we know your ideal of marriage,” laughed Mrs. Towne. “Philip is a good boy, but he sometimes needs looking after.”
“Stockings and shirt buttons!”