For we all shall be past it a hundred years hence.”
“I don’t know that, Rose. I like to think, with Anne, that in a world to come
‘The angel Laughter spreads her broadest wings.’
We may laugh at other things, but laugh we shall.”
“Dear Aunt Anne! The angel of laughter! I think I can hear him.”
“Just to go back a moment, Rose. You can’t talk out these deeper things. I, at least, must use the pen if I am at all able to discuss them. There never was truth in text or brief sayings that for me could stand alone. Even a proverb needs limbs of comment to get about usefully among mankind. Books of mere maxims I detest. Don’t! I see you mean to reply. Good-by to common sense to-day.”
“Aunt Anne was talking last night,” said Rose, “about the value of nonsense. I think it was apropos of just the very worst conundrum you ever heard,—you know what a lot of them the boys have. This one I have made a solemn vow never to repeat. She was wondering why the novelists never make people talk refreshing nonsense the way all really reasonable folks do sometimes.”
“I wonder more, Rose, why they so rarely get really good talk into their conversations, talk such as we do hear, gay and grave by turns. Of course they say of their characters things clever enough.”
“That is terribly true,—one tires of the endless essays about their people. Why not let them say of one another what is to be said. Aunt Anne says she hates to have a critical providence forever hovering about a story.”
“A good deal of the personal talk in novels is needed to carry on the tale. Still, there ought to be room for doing this in a way to make the talk in itself amusing at times, and not merely coldly developmental of character.”