“That may be so. To like or love a person, a friend, is pleasant; but to love and also fully to understand a friend is better. Then one is at ease, one has true peace, because we have then knowledge with love.”
“That was nicely put, my child, but one can’t talk out in full such subjects as this. One can only sow seed and trust to the fertilization of time. Where did you get your quotation about drifting?”
“I do not know; Aunt Anne would.”
“Oh, that, of course,” said Lyndsay; “she told us once that not to know the name of the man you quote is a form of ingratitude: to take the gift and forget the giver.”
“That is so like her: to label want of memory as intellectual ingratitude.”
“When we laughed,” said Lyndsay, “she added that quotations were mean admissions of our own incapacity of statement. Claiborne was dining with us,—you should have heard his comments. You know how perplexingly droll she is at times, and when she is in what the boys call a ‘gale’ of merry mind-play.”
“It sounds familiar. Aunt Anne is not above repeating her jests. I recall it now. She insisted gaily that it is bad manners to call up the spirit of a man, and accept his contribution to your needs, and then to say, ‘Sorry I forgot your name,’ and just show him to the door of your mind. She is great fun, sometimes.”
“Yes, sometimes. The fun is not always honeyed, or—if it looks so—of a sudden the bees crawl out of it and sting folks; but who can wonder? If it helps Anne to clap an occasional mustard-plaster on me, dear lady, she is welcome.”
“Once, Pardy, in Venice, she was in dreadful pain, and some women got in by mistake. She was perfectly delightful to those people. When they went away, I said, ‘Aunty, how much better you are!’ And what do you think she replied? ‘You will never know, dear, whether you have good manners or not until you have pain for one of your visitors,’ and then she fainted. I never knew her to faint, and I was dreadfully scared.”
“She ought to have excused herself,” said Lyndsay. “It was heroic foolishness.”