"I'm developing," whispered Marion. "It is the 'reflex influence of
Chautauqua' that you hear so much about."
Then she wrote this sentence from Dr. Walden's lips:
"Every author whose books go into the Sabbath-school is as much a teacher in that school as though he had classes there. A good book is a book that will aid the teacher in his work of bringing souls to Christ. I have known the earnest teaching of months to be defeated by one single volume of the wrong kind being placed in the hands of the scholar."
Suddenly Marion sat upright, slipped her pencil and note-book into her pocket, and wrote no more. A sentence in that address had struck home. This determination to enter the lists as a writer was not all talk. She had long ago decided to turn her talents in that direction as the easiest thing in the line of literature, whither her taste ran. She had read many of the standard Sunday-school books; read them with amused eyes and curling lips, and felt entirely conscious that she could match them in intellectual power and interest, and do nothing remarkable then. But there rang before her this sentence:
"Every author whose books go into the Sabbath-school is as much a teacher in that school as though he had classes there." A teacher in the Sabbath-school! Actually a teacher. She had never intended that. She had no desire to be a hypocrite. She had no desire to lead astray. Could she write a book that young people ought to bring from the Sabbath-school with them, and have it say nothing about Christ and heaven and the Christian life? Surely she could not be a teacher without teaching of these things. Must she teach them incidentally? Was saying nothing about them speaking against them? Dr. Walden more than intimated this.
"After all," she said, speaking to Ruth as the address closed, "I don't think I shall commence my book yet."
"Why?"
"Oh, because I am sacred." Then, impatiently, after a moment's silence, during which they changed their seats, "I'm disgusted with Chautauqua! It is going to spoil me. I feel my ambition oozing out at the ends of my toes, instead of my fingers as I had designed. Everybody is so awfully solemn, and has so much to say about eternity, it seems we can't whisper to each other without starting something that doesn't even end in eternity. But, wasn't he logical and eloquent?"
"I don't know," Ruth said, absently. And she wondered if Marion knew how true her words were. Ruth had heard scarcely a word of Dr. Walden's address since that last whisper, "So you are destined to immortality, remember." Words spoken in jest, and yet thrilling her through and through with a solemn meaning. She had always known and always believed this. She was no skeptic, yet her heart had never taken it in, with a great throb of anxiety, as it did at that moment. Was she being led of the Spirit of God?
The two merely changed their positions and looked about them a little, and then prepared to give attention to the next entertainment, which was a story from Emily Huntington Miller. Marion was the only one who was in the least familiar with her, she being the only one who had felt that absorbing interest in juvenile literature that had led her to keep pace with the times.