“They’re very much the same thing,” said Ailie.
“If I could be the child I was; if I could just remember—” She stopped herself and smiled.
“What vanity!” said she; “what conceit! If I could be the child I was, I dare say I would be pretty commonplace after all, and still have the same old draigled pinnies; but I have a notion that Lennox was never meant to make beds, dust stair-railings, or sit in a parlour listening, demure, to gossip about the village pump and Sacrament Sunday bonnets. To do these things is no discredit to the women who are meant to do them, and who do them well; but we cannot all be patient Marthas. I know, because I’ve honestly tried my best myself.”
“When you say that, you’re laughing at me, I fear,” said Bell, a little blamefully.
“I wasn’t thinking of you,” said her sister, vexed. “And if I was, and had been laughing, I would be laughing at the very things I love; it’s only the other things that make me solemn. Your way, Bell, was always clear before you,—there you were the lucky woman; with genius, as we have it in the child, the way’s perplexed and full of dangers.”
“Is she to be let drift her own way?”
“We got her ten years too late to prevent it,” said Miss Ailie firmly, and looked at her brother Dan for some assistance. He had Footles on his lap, stroking his tousy back, and he listened with twinkling eyes to the argument, humming the air of the day, that happened to be “Robin Tamson’s Smiddy, O!”
“You’re both right and you’re both wrong, as Mr Cleland used to say if he was taking a dram with folk that had an argument,” said the lawyer. “But I’m not so clever as Colin Cleland, for I can’t ring the bell and order in the media sententia. This I’ll say, that, to my mind, the child is lucky if she’s something short of genius. If I had had a son, my prayer would always be that he should be off and on about the ordinary. It’s lonely on the mountain-top, and genius generally seems to go with a poor stomach or a bad lung, and pays an awful price for every ecstasy!”
“Shakespeare!” suggested Miss Ailie.
“And Robert Burns!” cried Bell. “Except for the lass and the glass and the ran-dan— Poor misguided laddie! he was like the folk he lived among. And there was Walter Scott, the best and noblest man God ever gave to Scotland, he was never on the mountain-top except it was to bring a lot of people with him there.”