"You must be exactly like grandfather. I think you are one of the very few people left living in the world who do take trouble about their fellow-mortals. The rest of us are too selfish to bother."
"I like to be kind," said Mrs. Douglas, "but I don't take any credit for being kind. It's just my nature to want to give. The people who hate to give and yet make themselves do it are the ones who ought to be commended. It has always been my great desire to add a little to the happiness of the world, and I would never forgive myself if I thought I had added by one jot or tittle to the pain."
"I am very sure you haven't done that," Ann assured her. "You are the very kindest of funny little bodies, and when I call you 'Ella Wheeler Wilcox' I don't really mean it. But you must admit that it is often very vicarious kindness, and the burden of it falls on your family. Oh, the deplorable people who have come to us 'for a stop' because you thought they were lonely and neglected! Of course, they were, but it was because it almost killed people to entertain them; there's a reason for everything in this world. But what a shame to laugh at your efforts! Never mind. There are those
'Who, passing through Baca's vale,
Therein do dig up wells,'
and you are one of them. But to go on with your Life. Didn't you leave Inchkeld quite soon after Mark was born? I know Robbie and Jim and I thought it very hard lines that he should have been born in a lovely old historic city, while the rest of us had to see the light first amid coalpits and linoleum factories. Mark never let us forget it, either."
"Mark was two months old when we left Inchkeld. When the Kirkcaple congregation called your father he felt he ought to go. Oh! but we were a thoughtless couple. It never gave me a thought to leave the people who had been so good to us. I just took everybody's kindness as a matter of course. I was too young to realise how rare such kindness is, and their interest in the baby, and their desire to have us stay in Inchkeld seemed to me no more than natural. I was amused and pleased at the thought of going to a new place and a new house. You can hardly get changes enough when you are eighteen. In middle life one's most constant prayer is that God will let things remain as they are. What was that you were reading me the other night? I think it was from Charles Lamb."
Ann leant back in her chair and pulled a little green book from a bookshelf. "This, I think it was," she said, and read:
"'I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I, and my friends, to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be wearied by age, or drop like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave....'"
"Poor Charles Lamb!" said Mrs. Douglas, shaking her head. "There are times when one would like to stand still, where we seem to reach a pleasant, rich plain and are at our ease, and friends are many, and life is full of zest.... I don't know whether it was wise to leave Inchkeld. Your grandfather Douglas always regretted it. When he visited us at Kirkcaple one remark he always made was: 'A great pity Mark ever left Inchkeld.' We used to wait for it and the funny way he had of clearing his throat after every sentence."