“Ah!” he said, his eyes alight, “she has a wisdom born of God, I think, for managing these and all other concerns. She is unlike everybody else.”
Whereupon Gracie Dennis laughed; not a disagreeable laugh, but there came to her just then a sense of the strangeness of thinking that pretty Flossy Shipley, whom she had known all her life, and half-scorned from the heights of her childhood because she was a silly little thing, who could not do her problems in class, should have a wisdom unlike any others. Yet, almost immediately her laugh was stayed, because the change in Flossy was so great that she, too, recognized it as born of God. Sometimes it came with force to this proud young girl that if God could do so much for Flossy, what might he not be willing to do with those whom he had made intellectually her superior, if they were but ready to be led?
The young man, who was studying her, watched the grave look deepen on her face, and wondered at its source. What a pretty face it was. Oh, much more than pretty; there was great strength in it and sweetness, too, of a certain sort, but he could not help comparing the sort with that in some other faces, and he wondered over the difference. This young lady was a Christian. Why should her Christian experience stamp her with such a different expression from that which others wore? He always finished this sort of sentence with a blank space first, as though he did not choose to have himself tell himself any names. Yet he spoke a name forcibly enough, still gazing earnestly at Gracie.
“Did you ever meet Miss Joy Saunders?”
Gracie turned toward him a laughing face.
“No, but we are very anxious to, Flossy and I. We have both been told that we ought to know her, and told so earnestly that we really think we ought. Who is she? Is she, too, unlike anybody else?”
“Very,” he said, promptly. “I know her very little; she is the daughter of our landlady; I meet her in the hall on rare occasions, and sometimes catch glimpses of her just vanishing from some room as I enter; but as for being acquainted with her, I suppose I am not. I think—though of that I am by no means sure—that she is engaged to Dr. Everett.
“Oh, then, of course he would think naturally that people ought to know her. What is she like?”
“Like nothing,” said Alfred, with great promptness. “Did you ever know a person named Joy?”
“No;—what a singular name.”