"I never have talked to her about the mayflower business, as you call it."
"Do you mean to say that she doesn't know that you sold those flowers to buy a violin?"
Hope colored painfully as she answered,—
"I—I have never said anything about those things to her."
"You haven't? Well, now look here; you've been so nice keeping my secret, I'll keep yours. The girls, not one of them, shall hear a word from me of that poor time and the flower-selling,—not one word; you can trust me."
"Oh, no, no, Dorothea! You think I am ashamed of that 'poor time,' as you describe it,—that dear time, it ought to be described. No, no, it isn't because I was ashamed of that time that I haven't spoken to Kate or to the others, it is because I'm always shy of talking about myself, always, and I was more than ever shy of talking to girls about a way of living and doing that they knew nothing of, and that they would wonder at as I told of it,—wonder at and stare at me in their wonder, because they knew nothing only of one kind of living and doing,—their kind. It would have been like what it is sometimes for a musician to play to an audience a new composition that is full of strange chords and harmonies. The audience listens and wonders but doesn't understand, and so is not in sympathy with the player, and the player is made to feel awkward and uncomfortable, and as if he had made a mistake in producing the composition at that time. That was what I knew that I should feel if I talked to these girls. Don't you see what I mean?"
"Yes, I see, now that you've put it before me in this way, but I shouldn't, if you hadn't laid it out as you have; and—well, I suppose I might have felt just as you did in your place, only I shouldn't have known how to explain it to myself as you have."
"And then after you came," went on Hope, more as if she were relieving her own mind than addressing any particular person, "after that, it would have been more difficult to talk of that old time—"
"Because you thought I'd stowed away in my mind that old squabble just as you had, and would jump on you, and say a lot of disagreeable things. Well, I might have burst out with a lot of remarks and exclamations and questions, and stared at you as you say you expected to be stared at, but I shouldn't have had any feeling of spite against you, any more than I have now this minute, for, as I tell you, I'd never laid up anything, but you're so sensitive, you wouldn't have liked my remarks and questions before all the girls, I dare say."
"And I dare say this sensitiveness has made me cowardly. I thought one day last term when Kate Van der Berg was talking with Anna Fleming about people who had risen in the world by their own ability, and yet didn't like to refer to their early days of poverty and struggle, that I must be a great coward, and I was very unhappy over it for a while; but I know now that my cowardice isn't shame at all, but just that shrinking from talking to those who couldn't fully understand what I was talking of, and who would stare at me with wonder and curiosity because they didn't understand. But now, now, I'm not going to shrink any longer, I'm not going to have anybody ever think for a single moment that I'm ashamed of that dear time when we lived in that tiny cottage at Riverview, where I first began to learn to play on the little violin I earned myself, and where my dear, dear father made the little model of the engine that made his fortune."