Ann shook her head as she rose from the tea-table. "I've too many old women in it already. Besides, I'm not going to write just now. I'm going to lie in the most comfortable chair the room contains and read an article in the Times Literary Supplement called 'Love and Shakespeare.' Does that sound good enough?"
CHAPTER XX
The next evening when Ann sat down with an air of determination at the writing-table she asked: "Shall I make another stride, Mother? Go on another seven years? It's fine to wear seven-league boots and stride about as one likes among the years. What I ought to do, really, before I write any more, is to read one of the books Mr. Philip Scott sent me this morning. They are lives of different people, and he thinks they might help me a lot with yours."
"It was kind of him to send them," Mrs. Douglas said.
"Oh, thoughtful, right enough, as Glasgow people say. I shall thank him in a sentence I found in Montaigne—here it is. 'They who write lives,' says Montaigne, 'by reason that they take more notice of counsels than events, more of what proceeds from within doors than of what happens without ... are the fittest for my perusal.' Mr. Scott will be rather impressed, I should think."
Mrs. Douglas appeared to take little interest in Montaigne. She was looking over a book that Mr. Sharp had brought her to read that afternoon.
"Mr. Sharp was telling me," she said presently, "how good the Miss Scotts are about helping with anything in the village. He is very keen about getting up a club for the young men, and he told them about it, and they at once promised to have that empty house at the top of the village put in order, and their nephew, Mr. Philip Scott, sent a sum of money and is going to supply papers and books and magazines. Mr. Sharp was quite excited about it, quite boyish and slangy when he told me about the football and cricket clubs he hoped to start; you would hardly have known him for the shy, douce young man coming solemnly as a parson to talk to an old woman. I hadn't realised how young he was until to-day."
"I wish I had seen him," said Ann. "I hadn't thought of him as caring for football and cricket. When do his people come?"
"Oh, not till just before New Year. And the housekeeper has already begun to hold it over his head that the extra work will probably prove too much for her, and says that perhaps she ought to go now."