"I would suggest diffidently that when we had gone on to another and higher life we wouldn't feel the want of the homely things so necessary to us here, and Mrs. Daw, shaking her head, would say, 'I dinna ken,' and then with her great laugh (your father used to quote something about a thousand beeves at pasture when he heard it) she would finish the profitless discussion with 'Weel, sit ye doun by ma guid fire and I'll mak' ye a cup o' tea in ma granny's cheeny teapot. We'll tak' our comforts so long as we hae them, for think as ye like the next warld's a queer turn-up onyway....'"
CHAPTER IX
Evening had come again to Dreams, but Ann, instead of being found at her writing-table, was stretched flat in the largest and softest of the many comfortable chairs the room contained, with the Tatler, a great, furry, sleepy mass, curled in her arms.
"Dear me, Ann!" Mrs. Douglas said, looking up from her "reading." "You seem very exhausted. Aren't you going to write to-night?"
Ann looked through half-closed eyes at her mother.
"Can't," she said lazily; "too dog-tired. A tea-party in the Green Glen is too much for me. After such unwonted excitement I must sit all evening with my hands before me. Mother, did we ever really entertain people day after day—relays of them? I can't believe to-night that we ever presided at meetings, and read papers, and gave away prizes, and organised sales of work and cookery classes for the masses, and visited the sick, and talked for ever and did not faint—such feeble folk as we have become."
Mrs. Douglas sighed as she laid down Hours of Silence. "I was of some use in the world then," she said, "not a mere cumberer of the ground."
Ann sat up and laughed at her mother. "I'm not going to rise to that fly, Motherkin. You remind me of the Glasgow woman we met in Switzerland, who was suffering from some nervous trouble, and who said, 'I would give a thousand pounds to be the Mistress Finlay I once was.' Perhaps you are not quite the Mistress Douglas you once were, but I can see very little difference."
Mrs. Douglas sighed again, and shook her head. "Oh—sic a worrit-lookin' wumman!" Ann quoted. Then, "I must say I enjoyed the tea-party. Mother, don't you like Mr. Sharp? I do. You needn't have rubbed it in about sermons being no use if they are read. He sat with such a guilty look like a scolded dog. I like his painstaking sermons and his sincere, difficult little prayers. He will never make a preacher, but he is a righteous man. Miss Ellen Scott cheered him by saying read sermons were generally more thoughtful. I do wish we could see the Scotts oftener. They have promised to come to luncheon one day, and go thoroughly into the garden question. They go south, they told me, in the early spring, so that the servants may get the house-cleaning done, and they weary all the time to get back. I wonder if they carry about them in London that sort of fragrance of the open air."