As for John, he would not go to church; would not come to dinner with the family, but took what he called a "bite" by himself when he chose to come for it; would not stay in the room during the reading and the prayer, but strode off toward the barn the moment the subject was suggested by Lewis.
Yet, despite these drawbacks, the voice of prayer went up from the Morgan kitchen from full and grateful hearts.
[CHAPTER XIX.]
"WHATSOEVER."
I AM not sure that I can explain to you the state of mind in which Dorothy opened her eyes to the world on Monday morning. Unless you have had a like experience you will not understand it. She had always been a repressed rather than an indifferent girl. Under the apparently apathetic exterior there had boiled a perfect volcano of unsettled longing. She had not known what she wanted; she had not felt the least hope of ever discovering how her thoughts had taken new shape; she was in another world; she was another person; old things had passed away; all things had become new. She stood before her bit of mirror, and tried to arrange her heavy braids of hair as Louise wore hers; and, meantime, she was in a very eager, very unsettled state of mind. What was she to do? Where commence? The bare walls of her uninviting little room had always seemed to shut her in, and she had always hated them. Now it seemed to her that she had a right to get away from them—get outside, somewhere, and do something. How was it all to be accomplished? She looked with disdain upon her life; she felt her years, thus far, to have been wasted ones. Now she was ready to make a fresh start, only she could not imagine which stop to take first. You see her danger. Many a young life has shipwrecked its usefulness on just such rocks.
She threw down the covering of her bed, opened the window to let in the crisp winter morning, smelled of the frosty, sunlighted air, and looked abroad over her little world, shut in by hills and far-stretching meadows and home-like farms, and wondered just what she should do; and the sense of longing to get away from all this, whore there seemed nothing to do, was the strongest feeling that possessed her, unless the determination to accomplish it was a shade stronger.
She stepped out into the narrow little hall, and came face to face with Louise, who was fresh and smiling in a fresh calico and ruffles.
"Louise," said Dorothy, a whole world of repressed eagerness in her voice, "what am I going to do?"
"Ever so many things, I hope, dear," was Louise's prompt and cheery reply, and she emphasized it with a kiss.
"Yes," said Dorothy, with shining eyes, "I mean to, oh, I mean to; but—I don't know where to commence. What is there to do?—I mean for a beginning—and how shall I get to the first thing?"