“Well, well, Ellen,” he went on, “you must remember you’re perfectly free. We wouldn’t keep you from marrying when the right man comes along.”
“Yes, and maybe I will marry, sooner than you think! You watch out, Mr. Meadowburn!”
The pleasure of this stock joke lay in the fact that none of the Meadowburns believed there was danger of Ellen marrying, of any one caring to marry her, at least, whose social position would suit her. For she did not have kitchen-maid standards, as they knew. And she believed there was no danger either. She felt very old....
It was into this somewhat harsh and lonely existence that Potter had thrust his genial, boyish appearance, and by some strange affinity of comradeship, they had taken to each other at once. He too, as she was soon to learn, was lonely and cherished his dreams; and it comforted her to have a champion—even so young and small a champion as he. Was he so young and small? There were times when he frightened her with flashes of grown-up speech. It did not always seem quite nice, quite appropriate. For example, one evening when they were talking about perfectly ordinary matters, he burst out:
“You’re like Christ, Ellen. If He could be on earth He wouldn’t love Dr. Minor or any of those people in the church. He’d pick you.”
Her first thought about this was that it was deliberately bad, as bad as his smoking and his score of other boy tricks. It was blasphemous and wildly untrue. She sent him away in disgrace, much discomfited and hurt. Probably this rudeness of her own was what brought her so swiftly around to forgiveness, or it may be that she came to look kindly on his tribute. In any event, she gave Bennet a note for him, a queer, misspelled, dignified note....
When Potter returned she told him that he “must not think of Jesus as a person but as God, and that was the end of it.”
II
The next Spring, which followed on the heels of his fourteenth birthday, held a wonder for Potter Osprey such as he had not experienced before. Until now the green buds and soft winds had meant a time for the surreptitious stripping off of shoes and stockings after school (and out of sight of home), the agonizing anticipation of three long months of holidaying, and the making of limitless plans for outdoor fun. This year he welcomed the bright weeks not as a rowdy boy, but with a conscious relish that came from a deeper source within him.
The Spring itself, as if it also were filled with a sense of unusual importance, was precocious. When Potter, late every afternoon, ambled along the several blocks of blatantly new sidewalks that led to the church, the grass hid the softened brown earth with an abundance of delicate colour wherever feet had not trod, the robins and squirrels skipped perilously about the pavements and lawns oblivious of savage man, and exultant banks of snowballs escaping over the picturesque shingle- and iron-railed barriers of the old Clemons place, were just on the point of changing from their pale shade of willow bark into round fluffs of dazzling white as big as a boy’s head.