“Sweeping!” said the child. “I can’t sweep for keeps; Kate won’t give me a chance to learn. But anyhow I guess this is a good enough world for a miserable sinner like me.”
Mr Dyce, who had carried her, chair and all, into the garden, though she could have walked there, chuckled at this confession.
“Dan,” said Bell, “think shame of yourself! You make the child light-minded.”
“The last thing I would look for in women is consistency,” said he, “and I daresay that’s the way I like them. What is it Ailie quotes from Emerson? ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’—that kind of goblin never scared a woman in the dark yet. But surely you’ll let me laugh when I think of you chiding her gladness in life to-day, when I mind of you last week so desperate throng among the poultices.”
“I’m for none of your lawyer arguments,” said Bell, trying in vain to gag herself with a knitting-pin from one of the Shetland shawls she had been turning out for years with the hope that some day she could keep one for herself. “It might have been that ‘she pleased God and was beloved of Him, so that, living among sinners’—among sinners, Dan,—‘she was translated. Yea, speedily was she taken away, lest that wickedness should alter her understanding, or deceit beguile her soul.’”
“I declare if I haven’t forgot my peppermints!” said her brother, quizzing her, and clapping his outside pockets. “A consoling text! I have no doubt at all you could prelect upon it most acceptably, but confess that you are just as glad as me that there’s the like of Dr Brash.”
“I like the Doc,” the child broke in, with most of this dispute beyond her; “he’s a real cuddley man. Every time he rapped at my chest I wanted to cry ‘Come in.’ Say, isn’t he slick with a poultice!”
“He was slick enough to save your life, my dear,” said Uncle Dan soberly. “I’m almost jealous of him now, for Bud’s more his than mine.”
“Did he make me better?” asked the child.
“Under God. I’m thinking we would have been in a bonny habble wanting him.”