"I wish I felt as you do," was the half-envious answer; "there is nothing little about you, Queenie, Garth said so last night."
"Did he? you should not have told me that, Cath."
"Why not pray. I just asked him how he liked you; I wanted to get at his opinion, you see, and he answered, just as gravely as though he were mentor, that he thought I had chosen my friend wisely, that you seemed a thoroughly healthy-minded girl."
"I think we will go into the church now," interrupted Queenie, somewhat irrelevantly. There was a little flush of pleasure in her cheek. She was glad he had said that; it was just the sort of praise she most coveted. She wanted Cathy's people to think well of her; if the truth must be known, she hungered for their appreciation as a half-starved child might have done. Crumbs would not satisfy her; condescension or kindness would not feed her thoroughly; she must have their full commendation, their equal friendship. She had known them so long, she had seen them all so perfectly with her inner vision, that she could not feel as a stranger amongst them.
"I am so at home with them already," she had said to her friend the previous night. "There are no hard beginnings; we are friends to start with; there is no thawing, because there is no ice," she had said, with a certain vague enthusiasm, which, nevertheless, had been perfectly understood by Cathy. "One has so much hard up-hill work with most people," she had continued, talking out her thoughts half to herself. "Don't you know exactly how common-place people make acquaintance, how laboriously they try to find out one's tastes! They do it about as gracefully as though they were breaking stones on the highway, or hammering flints as boys do to elicit sparks, and all the time looking as though they knew you had nothing in you worth coming to light. Oh, it is terribly fatiguing. I once heard a very clever man liken modern society to the mummy-room of the British Museum. He said, 'Human beings were so swathed and bound up in conventionality that there was no getting at the real thing at all.'"
"I like Langley's way of knowing people," Cathy had answered; "she just knows them at once, takes it for granted, I mean, that all that interests her interests them. We had such an argument about it one day, when I would have it that she had bored some one about the soup-kitchen. 'I was so full of it myself that I knew that I should not talk so well on any other subject,' was her sole apology. And then she told me I was quite wrong, 'that people, after all, liked to be treated as reasonable beings, and not like children pleased with sugar-plums. "Give, and it shall be given you," was just as true in social intercourse as it was in the sense first intended. If you sow tares you will reap tares, child; always remember that,' she had finished. I prefer scattering precious grain. You have no idea how often one reaps a rich harvest. It is the real thing, you see, and people like that."
Queenie and Cathy were largely given to conversations such as these. It was just talking out their thoughts, as they called it. They aired all manner of quaint subjects in this way, these two honest-hearted girls. Both were a little vague at times; most women are. Cathy always amused her friend mightily. She had a habit at certain times, in her "goody moods," as she termed them, of taking herself to pieces to examine her moral mechanism, just as though she were examining the works of a new watch, as Queenie would tell her, clogging the wheels and stopping progress all the time. "If you are always taking yourself up by the roots to see how you grow you won't grow at all," she assured her in her droll way. "You ought not always to be looking at your defects and blemishes in the glass. People freckle from the sun sometimes; but I don't believe over-much sunshine hurts any one. Keep tight hold of the reins, never let go, and then try and forget everything but the road you are travelling. Forget nothing but yourself; mamma always said that."
There was something very fresh and sweet in this girlish intercourse, devoid as it was of vanity and selfishness; they were tolerably equal in capacity; neither could teach the other much, but they could learn together. It was as though they were two young gleaners following the reapers: now one gathered a stray sheaf and tossed it into the lap of the other; everything—an idea, a thought—was just a golden ear to be winnowed into grain. At times their content would have filled a granary.
Happy season of youth! when everything is delightful because everything is new; when harvests are more bountiful; when the mildew and the blight and the canker-worm are unknown; when the sky and earth meet and touch softly; when beautiful thoughts steal like strange birds in the twilight; when the glimmer of a star will provoke a reverie; when a hand-clasp will wake a world of dreams; when the whole universe is not too big a setting for one small beating heart; when one believes in one's guardian angel, and heaven is so near—so near.
It is not always so. Alas! alas! for the anointed eyes purged from their youthful blindness, made wise with the serpent-knowledge of evil and good. Tread softly here, ye worldlings, with lifted sandals and bated breath; for here, as in all real lovely things fresh from the Maker's hand, is indeed holy ground.