She paused and sat up straight and still, the book falling unheeded from her hand. Slowly her eyes widened, filled first with light and then with tears.
"If I had written this! If I could write anything!"
And suddenly, for that moment and for life, she knew!
"That is what I want—to write!—to make something beautiful!"
And then her guardian angel should have pushed her into the cage and fastened its door. For the sun was shining and the south wind was blowing—and it was the right cage!
CHAPTER V
One September afternoon, Peter lingered in his class-room after his duties were done and his pupils had departed. He usually lost no time in shaking the dust of academic toil from his feet—and from his mind—but to-day an unwonted longing for some steadying purpose, some raison d'être, made him remain to dally with the tools of his occupation, perhaps in a wistful hope that he might discover a hitherto unsuspected charm in the teaching of rhetoric to reluctant young girls.
"If they only cared," he thought, "if they only cared a little for the English language, it wouldn't be such a deadly grind to teach I them. But they'll never 'contend for the shade of a world.' It's just a dull necessity to them—this business of learning how to use their mother tongue—except, of course, to Sheila. And next year she won't be here to help me endure it. Oh, how I wish I could get away—to something better, something bigger!"
But with the wish, there came to him also the certainty of its futility. He wouldn't get away; the next year, and the year following, and the year after that would find him still at his uninspiring post in the Shadyville Seminary, teaching bored pupils the properties of speech, and inwardly cursing himself for doing it.