Bud hesitated. “Well, I—I like it,” said she. “I just love to lie awake nights and think about it, and I can hear the wind in the trees and the tide come in, and the bell, and the wild geese; and family worship at the Provost’s on Sunday nights, and I can almost be here, I think so powerfully about it; but—but—”
She stopped short, for she saw a look of pain in the face of her Auntie Bell.
“But what?” said the latter sharply.
“Oh! I’m a wicked, cruel, ungrateful girl, Auntie Bell; and I ought to want to love this place so much, nobody could push me out of it. And I do love it; but I feel if I lived here always I’d not grow any more.”
“You’re big enough,” said Auntie Bell. “You’re as big as myself now.”
“I mean inside. Am I a prig, Aunt Ailie? I’d hate to be a prig! But I’d hate as bad to tell a lie; and I feel I’d never learn half so much or do half so much here as I’d do where thousands of folk were moving along in a procession, and I was with them too. A place like this is like a kindergarten—it’s good enough as far’s it goes, but it doesn’t teach the higher branches.”
Bell gazed at her in wonder and pity and blame, shaking her head. All this was what she had anticipated.
“I know the feeling,” said Aunt Ailie, “for I have shared it myself; and sometimes still it will come back to me, but in my better hours I think I’m wiser and can be content. If there is growth in you, you will grow anywhere. You were born in the noise of Chicago, Bud, and I suppose it’s hard to get it out of the ears. By-and-by I hope you’ll find that we are all of us most truly ourselves not in the crowd but when we are alone, and that not the smallest hamlet in the world need be intellectually narrow for any one with imagination, some books, and a cheerful constitution. Do you understand that, Bud?”
Bud thought hard for a moment and then shook her head. “It sounds as if it ought to be true,” said she, “and I daresay you think just now it is true; but I simply can’t believe it.” And all of them turned at the sound of a chuckling laugh, to find that Mr Dyce had heard this frank confession.
“That’s the worst of you, Bud,” said he. “You will never let older folk do your thinking for you.”