“The big one would have been nicer.”
“I think so too, but she says young people don’t need a big press. But when my sister was married she got a big one.”
“Tell them you want a big one too.”
“It’s no use.”
“Try it. I won’t marry without that big one.”
“I will make them——”
This is a fair sample of what Walter overheard. He was dissatisfied and slipped away and hid himself, lost in thought. He didn’t even know himself what was the matter with him; but when Emma came and called him he looked as if he had been thinking of anything else but presses and vacant flats, for in a tone at once joyous and fearful he cried:
“Could it be she—my little sister?”
It was evening now, and the children were to continue their games indoors. As the little party was tired, one of the grown-ups was going to tell a story.
Just what “grown-up” had been requisitioned to narrate the story of Paradise and Peri, I don’t know. Anyway the story hardly harmonized with Betty’s engagement and that love-obstructing clothes-press. But just as Fortune is said to smile on everyone once in a lifetime, so, in the midst of the flatness and insipidity of everyday life, it seems that something always happens which gives that one who lays hold of it opportunity to lift himself above the ordinary and commonplace. To the drowning man a voice calls: “Stretch out thy arms, thou canst swim.”